Re: [Nano-devel] what is --nofollow good for?

[Mike Frysinger]

On 28 Jan 2016 19:54, Benno Schulenberg wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 28, 2016, at 17:47, Mike Frysinger wrote:
> > On 28 Jan 2016 10:01, Benno Schulenberg wrote:
> > > So this hasn't been working for at least twelve years.
> > > (And why should it?  If they want the symlink gone, they
> > > can simply delete it beforehand.  Why should nano do the
> > > work for them?)
> > 
> > because when you try to edit files in dirs that others have access to,
> > you want to make sure a save operation does not get redirected to a
> > place you did not intend.  simply saying "if there's a symlink, you
> > should delete it first" doesn't help.
> 
> Okay.  However, if the current code were working correctly,
> then there is a little time between the unlink of the symlink
> and the open(O_WRONLY | O_CREAT | O_TRUNC) of the file to be
> written.  So there is a window for someone to quickly recreate
> the symlink.  So --nofollow would give a false sense of security.

i'm not suggesting nano works well currently ;).  just providing
a real world example of where this functionality makes sense.  if
you don't want to support it, then so be it.

> Also, is there any other editor that has this feature: overwrite
> symlinks instead of following them?

no idea
-mike

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