On Thu, 16 Aug 2007 16:45:45 +0200 Joerg.Schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de 
(Joerg Schilling) wrote:
> James Carlson <james.d.carlson at sun.com> wrote:

> Let me try to first avoid to discuss things that are arguable...

> > > Don should know that there is no POSIX violation. He did not prove his 
> > > claim
> > > with a pointer to the POSIX standard, judge yourself whom to believe.....
> >
> >   http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007908799/xcu/tar.html
> >
> > It says nothing about (mis)interpreting an absolute path name as a
> > relative one, or about switching that behavior on or off.

> Correct, it does not forbid the behavor that has been chosen to make tar more 
> safe.

apologies for posting to a closed case
but I can't let this one go
an application does not have carte blanche to do operation X simply
because the standard does not forbid operation X

e.g., "it didn't say I couldn't kill(-1,9)"

there are other complications
suppose the archive contains the symbolic link
        /somedir/foo -> /dev/null
does the default "tar will be safe" mode interpret this as
        ./somedir/foo -> ./dev/null
or
        ./somedir/foo -> /dev/null
I don't even need an answer for this
the choice taken will be wrong for at least 2/3 of the users
(considering the unmangled /somedir/foo -> /dev/null case too)

-- Glenn Fowler -- AT&T Research, Florham Park NJ --


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