Re: [bitfolk] File and folder permissions for static web pages

On Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 05:48:08PM +0000, Stephen Bennett wrote: What!? What system do you use where the contents of the directory inode, when read(2) is called, do not equal its actual contents. The whole point is that you need the execute to enter, search or explore the directory. stat(2) in the case you describe is an operation on the file inode, and so just being able to tell that the inode is in the directory is not enough, because you can't enter the directory to operate on that inode. What you're seeing is that namei() (or whatever it's called in modern linux, the function that resolves inode numbers from paths) cannot enter that directory as that user because there is no execute permission. That means that you get EACCES back, and so that's what you get back from stat(). It's specious to talk about the "existence of a file" - because you can see whether the file exists by looking at the contents of the directory, which you can see. You just can't see anything (metadata or data) about that file, because you can't enter the directory to go and look, WHATEVER the permissions on the file happen to be. Cheers MBM