Re: core symlinks
der Mouse (mouse@Collatz.McRCIM.McGill.EDU)
Fri, 26 Aug 1994 06:23:31 -0400
>> It's been mentioned before that core dumps on some systems may
>> follow symlink and that this can be used to overwrite any file. I
>> was wondering if anyone knows which OS's and versions behave this
>> way.
> I believe that SunOS does not have this problem. The procedure for
> crashing SunOS is to first dump core into the swap space. After
> successfully writing to swap, it attempts to find a place on any of
> the mounted partitions which will facilitate the core file. If it
> does find a place, it will copy the core file from swap to that area,
> otherwise it will not. Hense, I don't think that symlinks are
> relevant to this problem.
First, this doesn't match any SunOS version I've ever seen; they all
have a specific place, passed as an argument to savecore, and if there
isn't room there, they don't go looking for room elsewhere. Perhaps
some imaginative person has attacked your rc scripts with an editor to
go looking for space before running savecore?
Second, it's completely irrelevant to the discussion, because we were
talking about ordinary coredumps from programs getting signals like
SEGV or QUIT, not kernel coredumps from OS crashes.
der Mouse
mouse@collatz.mcrcim.mcgill.edu