Sorry... I just couldn't help responding to the z/OS part...

On z/OS you can limit the access to the catalog and by that deny users from
listing the files in that catalog.
I think that most places don't do that but z/OS has this ability build in...

Offer Baruch
On Sep 30, 2013 6:01 PM, "John McKown" <[email protected]> wrote:

> I am looking a "porting" the Linux updatedb/locate program in the mlocate
> rpm to run on another UNIX system (z/OS to be exact). I don't understand
> why the mlocate.db is not world readable. Instead, the locate program is
> marked setgid. The only reason I have come up with is that the updatedb
> program loads the names of all the local (and perhaps NFS) file names into
> the mlocated.db file. And some of those may be in directories which are
> unreadable by some users.
>
> I am not really going to port the actual code, because I am pretty sure
> that I'm going to put the data into a sqlite3 data base so that others can
> write code to "do things" with it.
>
> This is where I don't understand. How can simply knowing if a file exists
> or not be a security concern? I admit to being ignorant of this because a
> user in z/OS can generally get a listing of the names of all the data sets
> (files) which exist on a z/OS system even if they cannot read them. Yeah,
> I've got some of those and one consultant was "uppity" about "why can't I
> read that? Justify it to me!!!" Who which I replied (quoting W.C. Fields):
> "Go away, boy, you bother me!"
>
> --
> I have _not_ lost my mind! It is backed up on a flash drive somewhere.
>
> Maranatha! <><
> John McKown
>
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