Newsgroups: comp.unix.internals Path: utzoo!censor!geac!gjetor!adeboer From: adeboer@gjetor.geac.COM (Anthony DeBoer) Subject: Re: non-superuser chown(2)s considered harmful Message-ID: <1990Dec10.231812.23634@gjetor.geac.COM> Organization: Geac J&E Systems Ltd. References: <18792@rpp386.cactus.org> Date: Mon, 10 Dec 90 23:18:12 GMT In article <18792@rpp386.cactus.org> jfh@rpp386.cactus.org (John F Haugh II) writes: >The context of the thread was that chown() messes up the quota mechanism, >and is therefore evil. Just for my $0.02 worth, if quotas are in effect, why not have a nightly daemon that goes through each user's directory and blows away anything he/she doesn't own? This should take care of out-chowning files to bypass allocation. The script would look something like: cd /u/users for USER in * do find $USER ! -user $USER -exec rm -rf {} \; done Provided that there aren't any public directories people can stash stuff into (ie. keep a handle on /tmp, /usr/spool/uucppublic, mail, etc., like you should be doing anyway), this should ensure that the number of blocks of stuff the user has equals what you see when you "du" their directory. The only other case involved would be other users sending files ("Can you give me a copy of XXXX?"), but if user A trusts user B (and anyone else in sight) enough to allow them to copy files into his/her directory, it would be reasonable to expect either user B to chown the copy of the file or for user A to copy it (to their own ownership) immediately after. And it would be more reasonable for user B to make the file readable and let user A do the actual copy anyway. -- Anthony DeBoer - NAUI #Z8800 adeboer@gjetor.geac.com Programmer, GEAC J&E Systems Ltd. uunet!jtsv16!geac!gjetor!adeboer Toronto, Ontario, Canada #include