Filesystems and case-insensitivity

Posted Nov 29, 2018 12:15 UTC (Thu) by alonz (subscriber, #815)
In reply to: Filesystems and case-insensitivity by dgm
Parent article: Filesystems and case-insensitivity

> use the case-folded name as the file name and add a name-as-provided attribute

This actually looks like one of the sanest proposals – I really wonder why the existing user-space solutions are not using this scheme.

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Filesystems and case-insensitivity

Posted Nov 29, 2018 12:43 UTC (Thu) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link] (1 responses)

They were written before random user-specified attributes were a thing, much less one you could rely on to be present (more or less). Even today you can easily create file systems without xattr support.

Filesystems and case-insensitivity

Posted Nov 29, 2018 15:11 UTC (Thu) by alonz (subscriber, #815) [Link]

Since kernel support for case insensitivity is currently even less if a thing, I still wonder...

(I may be tempted to write a PoC of this idea and see how it performs, just for curiosity's sake)

Filesystems and case-insensitivity

Posted Nov 29, 2018 15:57 UTC (Thu) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118) [Link] (1 responses)

I guess name-as-provided is for displaying in user interface?

% getfattr --name=user.name-as-provided malware.sh 
# file: malware.sh
user.name-as-provided="Safe.pdf"

Filesystems and case-insensitivity

Posted Nov 29, 2018 18:34 UTC (Thu) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link]

Well, that's easy enough to fix – verify that the xattr matches the filename before using it.

A non-malicious source of the same problem is somebody renaming the file with an old non-extended-filename-compatible tool (or libc).