[Rd] .Rhistory created with wrong permissions (PR#13752)

[Prof Brian Ripley]

Yes, it is by design, and not R's design at that.

How (or if) the history is saved is determined by the GUI interface in 
use.  In this case it appears to be command-line R built with readline 
support, in which case the saving is done by readline's write_history. 
And although the history.info manual does not say so, it does open 
files with pemissions 0600 (and there is no provison to change this).

To claim 'wrong permissions' implies that you 'know for certain' what 
the permissions should be -- I don't now how you can know them unless 
you can point to documentation that asserts the correct value as 
something different.

On Wed, 10 Jun 2009, Paul Gilbert wrote:

> Nicolas.Thierry-Mieg at imag.fr wrote:
>> Hi,
>> 
>> 
>> This is with a centos 5.3 x86_64 system, using R 2.8.1 (details below).
>> 
>> In a directory where R is invoked, at the end of a session R offers to 
>> "Save workspace image". Replying yes creates/updates at least two files in 
>> the current directory: .Rhistory and .RData.
>> .Rhistory is created with permissions 0600, therefore it effectively 
>> ignores umask. In particular, .Rhistory cannot be group-readable, which can 
>> be problematic in some environments.
>> This is not the case for .RData (created 0666, modified by umask as usual), 
>> so I doubt that the .Rhistory permissions are restrictive by design?
>> 
> I`m not sure, but it may be by design.  For example, users sometimes use 
> passwords to connections, which one might not want accidentally recorded in a 
> readable file.
>
> Paul
>> If not, it would be better to create .Rhistory 0666 and let the user 
>> control the actual permissions through umask.
>> 
>> Regards,
>> Nicolas Thierry-Mieg
>> 
>> *****************************
>> Steps to reproduce:
>> 
>> [nthierry at tryo ~]$ mkdir ttt
>> [nthierry at tryo ~]$ cd ttt
>> [nthierry at tryo ttt]$ R
>> <snip copyright and greeting message>
>>  > y<-3
>>  > q()
>> Save workspace image? [y/n/c]: y
>> [nthierry at tryo ttt]$ ls -la
>> total 20
>> drwxr-xr-x  2 nthierry timb 4096 Jun 10 16:21 .
>> drwxr-x--- 80 nthierry timb 4096 Jun 10 15:18 ..
>> -rw-r--r--  1 nthierry timb   61 Jun 10 16:21 .RData
>> -rw-------  1 nthierry timb    9 Jun 10 16:21 .Rhistory
>> [nthierry at tryo ttt]$
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Using strace on the R process shows the following, which seems to confirm 
>> that the problem comes from R itself:

Not at all: it comes from a library R uses.

>> open(".RDataTmp", O_WRONLY|O_CREAT|O_TRUNC, 0666)
>> <snip>
>> rename(".RDataTmp", ".RData")
>> open(".Rhistory", O_WRONLY|O_CREAT|O_TRUNC, 0600)
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> *****************************
>>  > version
>> platform       x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu
>> arch           x86_64
>> os             linux-gnu
>> system         x86_64, linux-gnu
>> status
>> major          2
>> minor          8.1
>> year           2008
>> month          12
>> day            22
>> svn rev        47281
>> language       R
>> version.string R version 2.8.1 (2008-12-22)
>> 
>> ______________________________________________
>> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>> 
> ====================================================================================
>
> La version française suit le texte anglais.
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> This email may contain privileged and/or confidential in...{{dropped:26}}
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595