On Sat, 20 Aug 2005, Miklos Szeredi wrote:
>
> My question is: is this deliberate or accidental? Wouldn't it be more
> logical to not require any permission to open such file? Or is there
> some security concern with that?
It's deliberate but historical. It's been a long time since I worked on
it, but it was meant for "special opens".
I _think_ it was used for things like "open block device without media
check" etc (we use O_NONBLOCK for that now), and it was used for directory
opens before we had O_DIRECTORY. (It's literally been years, so my
recollection may be bogus).
I don't think anything uses it any more, and it should probably be
deprecated rather than extended upon.
Linus
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