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file-readable? and AFS

To: schwartz@galapagos.cse.psu.edu
Subject: file-readable? and AFS
From: Olin Shivers <shivers@clark.lcs.mit.edu>
Date: Wed, 31 May 95 04:05:45 -0400
Cc: scsh-bugs@martigny.ai.mit.edu
Reply-to: shivers@mintaka.lcs.mit.edu
access(2) is out, as it uses the real uid and real gid, not the effective
uid and gid. As Scott noted, it is intended for setuid programs.

    I believe that the current implementation of file-readable? could be more
    reliable.  It assumes UFS semantics: it stats the file, then manually (?)
    checks the permission bits.

This is correct. Scsh assumes Unix. AFS doesn't respect Unix file protection
semantics. That's a problem.

The only real fix would be to make the file-readable? etc. calls AFS-aware.
That's pretty system-specific. And it *still* wouldn't handle the code that
explicitly used stat(2) (i.e., file-attributes). There's just a basic Unix/AFS
mismatch. However, if someone did AFS-aware versions of the higher-level
procedures, then you could code in a way that would be portable across the two
different file systems. Unfortunately, I don't have AFS on my system, so I
can't do this.
    -Olin

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