DO NOT REPLY [Bug 13353] New: - follows symbolic links to directories at risk of great data loss!

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http://nagoya.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=13353

<delete> follows symbolic links to directories at risk of great data loss!

           Summary: <delete> follows symbolic links to directories at risk
                    of great data loss!
           Product: Ant
           Version: 1.5.1
          Platform: All
        OS/Version: Linux
            Status: NEW
          Severity: Major
          Priority: Other
         Component: Core tasks
        AssignedTo: ant-dev@jakarta.apache.org
        ReportedBy: JimWright@quick.cz


I discovered the hard way that if I use <delete> to delete a temporary directory
created by the build then I must be very careful not to create symbolic links,
for test purposes say, to directories outside of my test data. I lost about 6
hours recovering and only because I had a fairly recent backup. It wasn't that I
was completely stupid ;-) but that I made a series of changes none of which
introduced obvious risk.

I consider this a bug because this sort of thing does not happen with other
tools available on platforms that support symbolic links. I believe it was
introduced sometime since August judging by ant-dev archive. I have a patch that
uses utils/FileUtils in taskdefs/Delete.java to check that a directory is not a
symbolic link before descending into it, but I am not sure of issues such as
backward compatibility. I suggest it might be optional but the default should
not descend such links.

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