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* [PATCH 0/2] vfs: Define new syscall getumask.
@ 2016-04-13 11:43 ` Richard W.M. Jones
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 12+ messages in thread
From: Richard W.M. Jones @ 2016-04-13 11:43 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: linux-kernel
  Cc: tglx, mingo, hpa, akpm, luto, viro, mathieu.desnoyers, zab,
	emunson, paulmck, aarcange, josh, xemul, sfr, milosz, rostedt,
	arnd, ebiederm, gorcunov, iulia.manda21, dave.hansen, mguzik,
	adobriyan, dave, linux-api

It's not possible to read the process umask without also modifying it,
which is what umask(2) does.  A library cannot read umask safely,
especially if the main program might be multithreaded.

This patch series adds a trivial system call "getumask" which returns
the umask of the current process.

Another approach to this has been attempted before, adding something
to /proc, although it didn't go anywhere.  See:

  http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/1292109

Another way to solve this would be to add a thread-safe getumask to
glibc.  Since glibc could own the mutex, this would permit libraries
linked to this glibc to read umask safely.

I should also note that man-pages documents getumask(3), but no
version of glibc has ever implemented it.

Typical test script:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <linux/unistd.h>
#include <sys/syscall.h>

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
  int r = syscall(329);
  if (r == -1) {
    perror("getumask");
    exit(1);
  }
  printf("umask = %o\n", r);
  exit(0);
}

$ ./getumask 
umask = 22

Rich.

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 12+ messages in thread

end of thread, other threads:[~2016-04-13 12:44 UTC | newest]

Thread overview: 12+ messages (download: mbox.gz / follow: Atom feed)
-- links below jump to the message on this page --
2016-04-13 11:43 [PATCH 0/2] vfs: Define new syscall getumask Richard W.M. Jones
2016-04-13 11:43 ` Richard W.M. Jones
2016-04-13 11:43 ` [PATCH 1/2] " Richard W.M. Jones
2016-04-13 12:21   ` Florian Weimer
2016-04-13 12:21     ` Florian Weimer
2016-04-13 12:40     ` Cyrill Gorcunov
2016-04-13 12:40       ` Cyrill Gorcunov
2016-04-13 11:43 ` [PATCH 2/2] x86: Wire up new getumask system call on x86 Richard W.M. Jones
2016-04-13 12:36   ` kbuild test robot
2016-04-13 12:36     ` kbuild test robot
2016-04-13 12:05 ` [PATCH 0/2] vfs: Define new syscall getumask Pavel Emelyanov
2016-04-13 12:05   ` Pavel Emelyanov

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