Bug 180350

Summary:	/etc/httpd/run link prevents grepping of /etc
Product:	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4	Reporter:	sysnet
Component:	httpd	Assignee:	Joe Orton <jorton>
Status:	CLOSED WONTFIX	QA Contact:
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	medium
Version:	4.0	CC:	rainer.traut
Target Milestone:	---
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	i386
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2006-05-17 11:44:39 UTC	Type:	---
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description sysnet 2006-02-07 15:04:44 UTC

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050317 Firefox/1.0.7

Description of problem:
Included as part of the httpd package is the symlink /etc/httpd/run, which points to a directory in /var.  It is often useful for a systems administrator to perform a grep on the entire contents of /etc.  However, grep follows this symlink and presumably gets hung up trying to read from a socket, causing it to hang indefinitely.

Please respect the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard, and remove this link.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
httpd-2.0.52-22

How reproducible:
Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. grep foo /etc


Additional info:

Comment 1 Rainer Traut 2006-05-16 15:05:05 UTC

I agree it should be removed because the link is juste useless.
It seems to be there to have apache writing its pidfile underneath /var/run.
But this never happens, as apache writes it to the log dir to
/var/log/httpd/httpd.pid
(Sys: RHEL4 x86_64 U3)

Maybe I should file another bugreport because the ghost pid file under
/var/run/httpd.pid
is never created but mentioned in the httpd init script.

Comment 2 Joe Orton 2006-05-17 11:44:39 UTC

Thanks for the reports.

The default httpd.conf uses the /etc/httpd/run symlink to place the pidfile at
/var/run/httpd.pid, using "PidFile run/httpd.pid".  It's generally useful to
keep these symlinks to allow the httpd.conf to avoid using absolute paths as far
as possible.

It is possible to prevent "grep -r" from reading from special files such as
sockets by passing the "--devices=skip" flag.

As such, I would not consider this strong enough justification for removal of
the symlink; certainly this could not be done in a RHEL3 update, since it would
break backwards compatibility.