Cypherpunks, Are there any heavy implications, security and otherwise, to the truncation of the environment variable PGPPATH that occurs in buildfilename()? Background: I've been trying all sorts of stuff getting pgp to read config.txt when I'm anywhere else in my directory structure. My home directory is /home/klbarrus which as it turns out is a symbolic link another directory (it may even change from time to time). Since I never could get PGPPATH to work on my old NeXT account, and my home directory there was also a link to something else, I thought: AHA! PGP uses stat() and/or some other functions which don't follow symbolic links!! Nope, it does, so that wasn't it. So, I poked around the code more and found out that buildfilename() returns null if the length of getenv(PGPPATH) is greater than 50. This probably explains why it didn't work on the NeXT; PGPPATH was set to some huge path like /private/Net/tree/Users/barrus/Cryptography/pgp or something close, so buildfilename() returned null. But the pathname on my new account is definitely shorter than 50 characters, but I decided to try increasing 50 just to see what it would do. Right before remaking pgp I realized the mistake I had made, one that is (export) almost too embarrasing to admit :-) Anyway, any "deep" reason to return null if the length of the environment variable is > 50? Or is it just to keep the path relatively short, maybe to keep from breaking a system call on some machine out there? -- Karl L. Barrus: klbarrus@owlnet.rice.edu keyID: 5AD633 hash: D1 59 9D 48 72 E9 19 D5 3D F3 93 7E 81 B5 CC 32 "One man's mnemonic is another man's cryptography" - my compilers prof discussing file naming in public directories
participants (1)
-
Karl Lui Barrus