Re: Thinking outside the box on file systems

[Michael Tharp <gxti@partiallystapled.com>]

Marc Perkel wrote:
> That not a problem - it's a feature. In such a
> situation the person would get a general file creation
> error.

Feature or not, it's still vulnerable to probing by malicious users. If
there are create permissions on the directory, the invisibility is not
perfect.

> Although it isn't likely people would structure
> files with invisible files in directories that the
> user has create permissions [...]

... /tmp ...

> [...] it is logical that if I
> put a file in a place where the user has no rights I
> want it to stay there. Currently the user can delete
> files where they have no rights.

Indeed. The sticky bit works around this, but IMHO it's a hack.

> I might also want to restrict the kind of a user can
> createor give permission to create only certian file
> names.
> 
> /etc/vz/conf/*.conf - create - readonly - self-rw
> /etc/vz/conf - deny 
> 
> This would allow the user to read all *.conf files,
> create new *.conf files, and full permissions to
> read/write/delete files that the user created but not
> files that others created. If listing a directory then
> only the *.conf files would appear even if other files
> are in the directory.

It'd be interesting to find a use case for this, but that's no reason
not to provide the functionality.

> Marc Perkel
> Junk Email Filter dot com
> http://www.junkemailfilter.com

  -- m. tharp