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Date: Mon, 01 Oct 2007 20:11:41 -0400
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Subject: Solaris and getcwd()
From: ab5602@wayne.edu (Rob Thompson)


Hi everyone, I just subscribed to this list in hopes of working out some
PHP bugs that have to do with Solaris.

I've been trying to find out some reason why the getcwd() PHP function
fails under some situations under Solaris.  Particularly, when some
component of the file path looks like: d--x--x--x (no read perms).  This
appears to be a security feature that Solaris implements that is not
there in Linux.  Here is what I found out:

If you are not root AND you want to get your current working directory
that has parents with without 'r' permissions, you must do one of
two things:

    a) Execute a getcwd() program that is suid-root.

       OR: And this is the strange one...

    b) Tell Solaris that you already know where you are!!

You can accomplish (b) by doing a 'cd /mydir/mysubdir/' where mydir has
the permissions (d--x--x--x).  Without changing directories with a
fully-qualified path, getcwd() will return NULL.

Here are my questions for the list:

   1) Is there any way for a running non-root instance of PHP under
Apache or another web server to "know where it is" in the directory tree
already, in hopes of implementing (b) above?

   2) I'm assuming that the current functionality of PHP include()
requires stdio's getcwd() in order to function with relative paths.  Is
this really the case?

   3) If #1 is possible and #2 is the case, would it be reasonable to
implement a fix for this with doing a chdir(), followed by a getcwd() if
your architecture is Solaris?

I could try and attempt a fix, but my knowledge of the PHP source is
sorely lacking at this time.  I'm working on bettering it!

Thanks!
-Rob