bugfindutils - Bugs: bug #67709, O_NOFOLLOW documentation is out of...

 
 

bug #67709: O_NOFOLLOW documentation is out of date

Submitter:  James Youngman <jay>
Submitted:  Sun 16 Nov 2025 05:00:54 PM UTC
   
 
Category:  documentation Severity:  2 - Minor
Priority:  5 - Normal Item Group:  None
Status:  None Privacy:  Public
Assigned to:  None Originator Name: 
Open/Closed:  Open Release:  None
Fixed Release:  None
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Sun 16 Nov 2025 05:00:54 PM UTC, original submission:  

The find documentation (e.g. "Changing the Current Working Directory") in the Texinfo documentation talks about O_NOFOLLOW.  But the only place the current find code uses O_NOFOLLOW directly is in -samefile.

oldfind also used to use O_NOFOLLOW but that code was deleted
in 5768a03ddfb5e18b1682e339d6cdd24ff721c510 (2021).  Therefore the only directory traversal implementation in use for find is gnulib's fts(), which uses O_NOFOLLOW, but uses HAVE_WORKING_O_NOFOLLOW to determine whether it will work.  That's a compile-time constant, whereas find attempted to figure out whether O_NOFOLLOW was likely to work at runtime.

So the Texinfo documentation concerned with O_NOFOLLOW is all likely out of date.   It should be removed (or scoped much more narrowly, to describe only -samefile).

We should also consider retiring check_nofollow().  The systems it knows about where the binary might be running but where O_NOFOLLOW does nothing (Linuc <= 2.1.126 and FreeBSD < 3.0-CURRENT) are old enough now that the benefits likely don't justify the complexity.

When we make these changes, we should also decide what to do about the version output, which currently states whether the binary was configured to use O_NOFOLLOW and whether find thinks that O_NOFOLLOW actually works on the current system.

James Youngman <jay>
Group administrator

 

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