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Re: Cannot exec() program outside of /bin if PATH is unset


Eric Blake wrote:
On 09/12/2014 11:02 AM, Christian Franke wrote:
If PATH variable is unset or does not contain /bin or /usr/bin,
exec("/not_bin/program", ...) fails because cygwin DLLs could not be
loaded.

This affects postfix which cleans the environment to the bare minimum
for security reasons.
(fortunately there is an easy workaround, so this does not block postfix
ITP)

Testcase:

$ cat nopath.cc
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <unistd.h>
// #include <windows.h>

int main()
{
   unsetenv("PATH");
This is undefined behavior, per POSIX.  POSIX recommends that you always
leave PATH defined to at least a bare minimum of the results of
confstr(_CS_PATH, ...); it also states that implementations are free to
do what they want (in this case, crash) if you don't follow the
recommendation:

http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/basedefs/V1_chap08.html
"If PATH is unset or is set to null, the path search is
implementation-defined."

There is no POSIX PATH search needed in my testcase:
  execl("/usr/sbin/alternatives", ...)

The alternatives.exe could be found. The required DLLs could not be loaded.
POSIX does not specify anything about the load path of shared libraries.
On Linux, LD_LIBRARY_PATH is completely separate from PATH.
On Windows, the DLL load path is connected to PATH.

Enabling the SetDllDirectory() Win32 call fixes the problem.
Would possibly make sense to add this call to cygwin1.dll.
That said, just because POSIX has already given us the
get-out-of-jail-free card doesn't mean that we can't be nice and improve
cygwin1.dll to try and help broken programs that unset PATH.

Hmm... is postfix actually broken?
Unsetting PATH is IMO sane (from the POSIX POV) if all exec() calls use absolute path names.

Christian


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