Changing permissions on symbolic links [LWN.net]

Changing permissions on symbolic links

Posted Aug 31, 2023 23:45 UTC (Thu) by corbet (editor, #1)
In reply to: The first half of the 6.6 merge window by th0ma7
Parent article: The first half of the 6.6 merge window

No, I would not expect this change to affect user space. Most filesystems already do not allow symlink permissions to be changed, and those permissions are meaningless in any case.

Note that we're not talking about changing permissions on the target of a symlink, only the symlink itself.

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Changing permissions on symbolic links

Posted Sep 1, 2023 13:39 UTC (Fri) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] (1 responses)

Has it even been possible to express the operation of changing symlink permissions? "chmod symlink" dereferences the link to the thing it points to.

Changing permissions on symbolic links

Posted Sep 1, 2023 13:48 UTC (Fri) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

fchmodat() can do that; see this article from July.