tree 90f7240d55b4173ff6c457189ba18f8607ffa9dc
parent d0ed169b4599f48baa5cc6f2b9085e90e1dcefdb
author Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> 1317165546 -0500
committer Herbert Xu <herbert@gondor.apana.org.au> 1416235897 +0800

[BUILTIN] Fix "test -x" as root on FreeBSD 8

POSIX.1-2008 §4.4 "File Access Permission" sayeth:

	If execute permission is requested, access shall be granted
	if execute permission is granted to at least one user by the
	file permission bits or by an alternate access control
	mechanism; otherwise, access shall be denied.

For historical reasons, POSIX unfortunately also allows access() and
faccessat() to return success for X_OK if the current process is
privileged, even when the above condition is not fulfilled and actual
execution would fail.  On the affected platforms, "test -x <path>" as
root started returning true on nonexecutable files when dash switched
from its own emulation to the true faccessat in v0.5.7~54
(2010-04-02).

Work around this by checking the permissions bits when mode == X_OK
and geteuid() == 0 on such platforms.

Unfortunately the behavior seems to vary from one kernel version to
another, so we cannot just check the behavior at compile time and rely
on that.  A survey of some affected kernels:

 - NetBSD's kernel moved to the sane semantics in 1997
 - OpenBSD's kernel made the same change in version 4.4, three years
   ago
 - FreeBSD 9's kernel fixes this but hasn't been released yet

It seems safe to only apply the workaround on systems using the
FreeBSD kernel for now, and to push for standardization on the
expected access()/faccessat() semantics so we can drop the workaround
altogether in a few years.

To try it on other platforms, use "./configure --enable-test-workaround".

Reported-by: Christoph Egger <christoph@debian.org>
Analysis-by: Petr Salinger <Petr.Salinger@seznam.cz>
Signed-off-by: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Herbert Xu <herbert@gondor.apana.org.au>