Re: open("foo", 3)

[Linus Torvalds]

On Sat, 20 Aug 2005, Miklos Szeredi wrote:
> 
> My question is: is this deliberate or accidental?  Wouldn't it be more
> logical to not require any permission to open such file?  Or is there
> some security concern with that?

It's deliberate but historical. It's been a long time since I worked on
it, but it was meant for "special opens".

I _think_ it was used for things like "open block device without media
check" etc (we use O_NONBLOCK for that now), and it was used for directory
opens before we had O_DIRECTORY. (It's literally been years, so my 
recollection may be bogus).

I don't think anything uses it any more, and it should probably be 
deprecated rather than extended upon.

		Linus
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/