Ulrich Windl wrote:
>>
>> Preventing random people from deleting your directory is a whole lot easier
>> than preventing people from walking into your directories (which is
>> impossible because of the guy named "root").
>
>The guy named "root" can also delete your home directory while you
>are in Emacs...
>
root can also delete my home directory while I'm not even logged on, so
that makes no difference -- my work is gone in either case.
>> I don't like the idea of a race condition where I can't ever be sure that
>> my rmdir("/var/spool/whatever/job-0815") is successful at about 3 am
>> because that's when my network backup is running.
>
>Why would you want to do that? Your arguments are NOT convincing.
>
Lets' say I have a server. The server creates a directory for each job.
When the job is finished, the directory is deleted.
This works perfectly, except (with a directory-locking scheme) when there's
somebody else in the same directory. Like the network backup process. Or my
shell, when I want to check up on the job's process.
Right now, the server deletes the directory, and the backup process sees
it's empty and moves on to other things. I can do the same with my shell.
(Not being able to call getwd() successfully isn't a problem, that happens
very often, eg. when the parent directory is unreadable.)
With locking, the directory will be undeletable and it'll sit around forever.
Call me dense, but I just don't understand which particular problem you're
trying to solve here.
-- I hear what you're saying but I just don't care.-- Matthias Urlichs \ noris network GmbH / Xlink-POP Nürnberg Schleiermacherstraße 12 \ Linux+Internet / EMail: urlichs@noris.de 90491 Nürnberg (Germany) \ Consulting+Programming+Networking+etc'ing PGP: 1024/4F578875 1B 89 E2 1C 43 EA 80 44 15 D2 29 CF C6 C7 E0 DE Click <A HREF="http://info.noris.de/~smurf/finger">here</A>. 42