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Full Discussion: Unix File Permissions
Top Forums UNIX for Beginners Questions & Answers Answers to Frequently Asked Questions Tips and Tutorials Unix File Permissions Post 73757 by Perderabo on Friday 3rd of June 2005 08:40:19 PM
Old 06-03-2005
Enforcement Mode File Locking/Manditory File Locking

We aren't finished with that Set Gid bit yet... Unix has a concept of file locking. File locking is beyond the scope of this thread. But you need to know that file locking comes in two flavors: advisory and manditory. Which flavor applies to a particular file depending on the permission settings. If the group execute bit is off but the setgid bit is on, any file locks on that file are manditory.

Useless Bit Combination?

Every reference that I have seen says that setgid on / group execute off is a otherwise useless combination. Even Richard Stevens (in Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment) says "Since the set-group-ID bit makes no sense when the group-execute bit is off, the designers of SVR3 chose this way to specify that the locking for a file is to be maditory locking and not advisory locking."

Well consider this case: Fred runs the Human Resources department. Fred and his group often need to lookup the vacation days used for employees. Fred decides to write a program so employees can lookup their own vacation days used. For security, Fred makes this program do a lot of logging. Fred decides that he doesn't want his group to use this program. They have other tools that won't clutter his log. So Fred does:
chown fred:hr vdays
chmod 2701 vdays
Now the vdays program cannot be run by members of hr (except fred). But it can be run by everyone else. And it will assume the gid of hr when it does run. I have written a test program, set it up like this, and have run it on both Solaris and HP-UX. It works.

Effect on ls output

While this bit combination may be useful is some limited cases, for better or worse, it will have two effects. The vdays program does work, but if a lock is attempted on the file, it will be manditory. As a practical matter, this would impact only an occasional program like a debugger. But ls may treat this bit combination differently. I have seen both of these...
Code:
chown fred:hr vdays
chmod 2701 vdays
-rwx--S--x   1 fred     hr          9938 Jul 16  2004 vdays
-rwx--l--x   1 fred     hr          9938 Jul 16  2004 vdays

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CHMOD(2)							System Calls Manual							  CHMOD(2)

NAME
chmod - change mode of file SYNOPSIS
#include <sys/types.h> #include <sys/stat.h> int chmod(const char *path, mode_t mode) DESCRIPTION
The file whose name is given by path has its mode changed to mode. Modes are constructed by or'ing together some combination of the fol- lowing, defined in <sys/stat.h>: S_ISUID 04000 set user ID on execution S_ISGID 02000 set group ID on execution S_ISVTX 01000 `sticky bit' (see below) S_IRWXU 00700 read, write, execute by owner S_IRUSR 00400 read by owner S_IWUSR 00200 write by owner S_IXUSR 00100 execute (search on directory) by owner S_IRWXG 00070 read, write, execute by group S_IRGRP 00040 read by group S_IWGRP 00020 write by group S_IXGRP 00010 execute (search on directory) by group S_IRWXO 00007 read, write, execute by others S_IROTH 00004 read by others S_IWOTH 00002 write by others S_IXOTH 00001 execute (search on directory) by others If mode ISVTX (the `sticky bit') is set on a directory, an unprivileged user may not delete or rename files of other users in that direc- tory. (Minix-vmd) Only the owner of a file (or the super-user) may change the mode. Writing or changing the owner of a file turns off the set-user-id and set-group-id bits unless the user is the super-user. This makes the system somewhat more secure by protecting set-user-id (set-group-id) files from remaining set-user-id (set-group-id) if they are modified, at the expense of a degree of compatibility. RETURN VALUE
Upon successful completion, a value of 0 is returned. Otherwise, a value of -1 is returned and errno is set to indicate the error. ERRORS
Chmod will fail and the file mode will be unchanged if: [ENOTDIR] A component of the path prefix is not a directory. [ENAMETOOLONG] The path name exceeds PATH_MAX characters. [ENOENT] The named file does not exist. [EACCES] Search permission is denied for a component of the path prefix. [ELOOP] Too many symbolic links were encountered in translating the pathname. (Minix-vmd) [EPERM] The effective user ID does not match the owner of the file and the effective user ID is not the super-user. [EROFS] The named file resides on a read-only file system. [EFAULT] Path points outside the process's allocated address space. [EIO] An I/O error occurred while reading from or writing to the file system. SEE ALSO
chmod(1), open(2), chown(2), stat(2). NOTES
The sticky bit was historically used to lock important executables into memory. 4th Berkeley Distribution May 13, 1986 CHMOD(2)
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