work around linux's lack of flags argument to fchmodat syscall

previously, the AT_SYMLINK_NOFOLLOW flag was ignored, giving
dangerously incorrect behavior -- the target of the symlink had its
modes changed to the modes (usually 0777) intended for the symlink).
this issue was amplified by the fact that musl provides lchmod, as a
wrapper for fchmodat, which some archival programs take as a sign that
symlink modes are supported and thus attempt to use.

emulating AT_SYMLINK_NOFOLLOW was a difficult problem, and I
originally believed it could not be solved, at least not without
depending on kernels newer than 3.5.x or so where O_PATH works halfway
well. however, it turns out that accessing O_PATH file descriptors via
their pseudo-symlink entries in /proc/self/fd works much better than
trying to use the fd directly, and works even on older kernels.
moreover, the kernel has permanently pegged these references to the
inode obtained by the O_PATH open, so there should not be race
conditions with the file being moved, deleted, replaced, etc.

0 files changed, 0 insertions, 0 deletions