On 13 August 2012 23:49, Richard O'Keefe
<ok@cs.otago.ac.nz> wrote:
On 13/08/2012, at 11:26 PM, Alexander Kjeldaas wrote:
>
> This isn't that hard - a pipe shouldn't be needed anymore. Just require a post-2003 glibc.
>
> fexecve is a system call in most BSDs. It is also implemented in glibc using a /proc hack.
fexecve is now in the Single Unix Specification, based on
POSIX as of 2008, I believe. However,
http://www.gnu.org/software/gnulib/manual/html_node/fexecve.html
says
Portability problems not fixed by Gnulib:
* This function is missing on many non-glibc platforms: MacOS X 10.5, FreeBSD 6.0,
NetBSD 5.0, OpenBSD 3.8, Minix 3.1.8, AIX 5.1, HP-UX 11, IRIX 6.5, OSF/1 5.1,
Solaris 11 2010-11, Cygwin 1.5.x, mingw, MSVC 9, Interix 3.5, BeOS.
That warning doesn't seem to be fully up to date. I'm using MacOS X 10.6.8
and fexecve() isn't in the manuals or in <unistd.h>.
FreeBSD 8.0 is covered.
OpenBSD not covered
OS X not covered
Solaris probably not covered.
So support is pretty good, I'd say. For non-modern systems, checking the existence of the file first is possible. The race isn't important, and one can always upgrade to a modern operating system.
Alexander