Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 180350
/etc/httpd/run link prevents grepping of /etc
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:07:23 EST
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:
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.
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.