On Mon, 8 Dec 2003, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> Hi,
>
> There are a bunch of applications, which, for security reasons, want to
> set $PATH to a fixed value. This approach is a bit tricky on Windows,
> since the needed paths to the Windows system directories are not fixed
> values as it's on POSIX systems. A lot of applications are falling back
> to values like _PATH_DEFPATH or _PATH_STDPATH and use them to set $PATH
> before starting another application. Sshd, login, cron are just three
> of them. The current patches to all three applications are so that the
> code which sets $PATH before exec'ing another process is not executed
> when built for Cygwin.
>
> I think a better approach is this: Let's generalize the idea of a fixed
> path to the Windows system directories. I suggest, that one of the base
> install scripts creates a symlink "/WINDOWS" like this:
>
> ln -s `cygpath -m "$WINDIR"` /WINDOWS
>
> This allows to keep the above described code to set $PATH in the
> affected tools, just by redefining, say _PATH_DEFPATH like this:
>
> #ifdef _PATH_DEFPATH
> #undef _PATH_DEFPATH
> #define _PATH_DEFPATH
> "/usr/bin:/bin:/WINDOWS/system32:/WINDOWS:/WINDOWS/COMMAND/WINDOWS/system32/Wbem"
> #endif
>
> which contains both, NT and 9x paths. We could perhaps even change
> /usr/include/paths.h to reflect this, at one point.
>
> Opinions?
> Corinna
FWIW, I agree that it's a good idea to have a fixed pointer to the windows
directory, but I don't think "/" is the right place to have it. Could we
make it "/mnt/WINDOWS" or "/opt/WINDOWS" or something? I don't like
cluttering up the root directory unnecessarily...
Igor
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