In Red Hat 7.1 and prior releases, as well as in other Unixen, attempting to run more on a file which the user does not have permission to access results in the logical error message "permission denied." Some time during the betas, this was broken. more now reports "illegal seek" when users try to use more as a page for files for which they don't have read permission. This is a regression from prior releases. RH 7.1: [kaboom@hanuman kaboom]$ ls -l /tmp/foo -rw------- 1 root root 12636 Sep 3 22:49 /tmp/foo [kaboom@hanuman kaboom]$ more /tmp/foo /tmp/foo: Permission denied [kaboom@hanuman kaboom]$ id uid=500(kaboom) gid=500(kaboom) groups=500(kaboom),10(wheel) [kaboom@hanuman kaboom]$ RC2: [kaboom@verdande kaboom]$ ls -l /boot/grub/grub.conf -rw------- 1 root root 667 Aug 31 19:36 /boot/grub/grub.conf [kaboom@verdande kaboom]$ more /boot/grub/grub.conf /boot/grub/grub.conf: Illegal seek [kaboom@verdande kaboom]$ id uid=500(kaboom) gid=500(kaboom) groups=500(kaboom),10(wheel) [kaboom@verdande kaboom]$ sudo more /boot/grub/grub.conf # grub.conf generated by anaconda # <snip rest of output>
I can't reproduce this with util-linux-2.11n-1 from rawhide, running 'more /etc/shadow'.