[Haskell-cafe] Re: Bug in runInteractiveProcess?

[Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH]

On Oct 17, 2007, at 0:39 , Donn Cave wrote:

> On Oct 16, 2007, at 7:31 PM, Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH wrote:
>
>> I could dig for official confirmation, but this is my  
>> understanding of both POSIX and SUS, and portable C programs  
>> generally #define FD_CLOEXEC to 1 if it doesn't already exist,  
>> since the value *is* standard even though the name is not.
>
> I find `runInteractiveProcess' in System.Process, in the  
> documentation -
> not System.Posix.Process.  Possibly the C macro is less important than
> the cross-platform semantics relating to this problem.  I.e., what  
> happens
> on Microsoft Windows.  I sure wouldn't know.  Does a process even  
> inherit
> pipe file descriptors?

The context of my message was a proposal for how to fix it on POSIX  
systems.  I do not claim to have sufficient understanding of Win32  
APIs to fix that implementation --- but I suspect that there are  
already many other implementation differences between the POSIX and  
Win32 versions of System.Process, if only because popen(), fork(),  
and exec() are entirely foreign concepts in Win32.

> As for closing file descriptors explicitly - if I remember right  
> what I've seen
> in the NetBSD source, the UNIX popen() implementation may years ago
> have closed all file descriptors, but now it keeps track of the  
> ones it created,
> and only closes them.  I think that's the way to go, if closing fds.

Either implementation causes problems; security folks tend to prefer  
that all file descriptors other than 0-2 (0-4 on Windows?) be closed,  
and 0-2(4) be forced open (on /dev/null if they're not already  
open).  But in this case, the idea is to set FD_CLOEXEC on (and only  
on) file descriptors opened by the Haskell runtime, so you would get  
the same effect as tracking file descriptors manually.

-- 
brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] allbery at kf8nh.com
system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allbery at ece.cmu.edu
electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university    KF8NH