Re: Digital UNIX/Irix mesg problem

John Sheehy (jes@GROVE.UFL.EDU)
Tue, 29 Apr 1997 18:35:04 -0400

On Tue, 29 Apr 1997, Tom Leffingwell wrote:

| This is rather stupid and not much of a bug, but it shouldn't
| happen. Basically, the permissions on your tty are set correctly, with
| messages on, during login. If you turn them off, and then turn them back
| on, your tty becomes world writable. (Actually, you don't have to turn
| them off, mesg y automatically sets permissions that way). I don't
| remember that being that way in Digital UNIX 3, but I can't think of a box
[...]

On Digital Unix 3.2D-1:

> uname -a
OSF1 hostname V3.2 41 alpha

> ls -l /dev/ttyq5
crw--w---- 2 jes terminal 6, 21 Apr 29 18:23 /dev/ttyq5

> mesg n

> ls -l /dev/ttyq5
crw------- 2 jes terminal 6, 21 Apr 29 18:23 /dev/ttyq5

> mesg y

> ls -l /dev/ttyq5
crw--w--w- 2 jes terminal 6, 21 Apr 29 18:23 /dev/ttyq5

On Diigital Unix 3.2G:
# uname -a
OSF1 ns V3.2 62 alpha

# ls -l `tty`
crw--w---- 1 root terminal 5, 5 Apr 29 18:32 /dev/tty07
# mesg n
# ls -l `tty`
crw------- 1 root terminal 5, 5 Apr 29 18:32 /dev/tty07
# mesg y
# ls -l `tty`
crw--w--w- 1 root terminal 5, 5 Apr 29 18:32 /dev/tty07

This is rather annoying. Time to write a script to replace mesg.

-John Sheehy