In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Marc Slemko
writes:
: Why does FreeBSD let you create paths longer than MAXPATHLEN?
Because this is allowed.
: I often have various trees that are as deep as possible for testing various
: programs for holes, and I finally figured out why locate wasn't updating its
: database properly; it was choking as soon as it saw a path length
: >MAXPATHLEN long. The question, however, is why can it see a path length
: longer than MAXPATHLEN?
MAXPATHLEN is the longest pathname that the kernel system calls can
handle, but it isn't the longest pathname that can exist especially
due to symbolic links.
: I would also wonder if there aren't some security issues resulting
: from this. From what gdb shows, locate seems to trash its stack
: before spitting out the error about the path being too long...
That is an error in the program in question. I do know that the
shells on FreeBSD haven't been well audited for buffer overflows.
Warner
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