Re: [hylafax-users] WARNING: Potential Risk With Faxsetup

[Lee Howard <faxguy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

A. Kalten wrote:

> The culprit was the HylaFAX faxsetup script.  I don't recall
> exactly what happened, but at one point I had exited the
> script using the CTRL-C key.  When faxsetup was run again,
> it completely removed the /tmp directory.
>
> Faxsetup contains a variable TMPDIR which is used to
> refer to a temporary storage directory.  This is a bad
> choice because a system variable TMPDIR already exists.
> On my system, TMPDIR = /tmp, and somehow, when faxsetup
> was restarted, the value of this variable was retained.
> Because this directory is removed by faxsetup, my entire
> /tmp directory was deleted.
>
> The name of this variable should be changed to TEMPDIR
> or TEMP or something else that will not conflict with
> the already present TMPDIR system variable.

There was a bug in faxsetup prior to 4.3.1 and HylaFAX+ versions prior 
to 4.3.0.12 that would cause faxsetup to, on the conditions you 
describe, delete TMPDIR without first creating it... and so if TMPDIR is 
set by the environment this could cause the problem you experienced.

As indicated by a comment in the hylafax-log man page, TMPDIR, however, 
the correct name for faxsetup to give to its temporary directory because 
common library functions (i.e. tempnam) used by all sorts of programs 
will be expected to make use of that.

There is a certain amount of risk that you run when testing/playing with 
older releases of software - in that you may run into a known bug.

Lee.

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