Re: TOCTOU bug in make(1)

On 7/10/22 09:49, Joerg Sonnenberger wrote:
> Am Fri, Oct 07, 2022 at 09:07:10AM +1300 schrieb Lloyd Parkes:
>>
>> That's a good point. Personally, I had forgotten that unlinking directories
>> was a thing. We should put a comment in the code for unlink_file() about
>> that.
> 
> Well, if you read the code you should start to wonder why it does the
> whole lstat + check for directory dance...

Yeah, nah. Only people those few people who are actually still using 
antique Unix systems will be able to work this out. Everyone else will 
need to be psychic and that isn't an acceptable way to write code.

This code is in the core NetBSD source tree (usr.bin/make) and the 
unlink_file() function has no use in NetBSD. This is intrinsically worth 
documenting.

I have to admit that I sometimes wonder whether or not it is true that 
the bulk of the comments in the *BSD code base is in fact the BSD 
license repeated across each .c file. If we can spend 30 seconds typing 
in a one line comment that saves one person 15 minutes of head 
scratching, then we have already made our software more efficient as a 
code base to use.

Lloyd