* * * * *
                                        
                        The times were simpler back then
                                        
So I'm reading up on the history of chroot() [1] (link via Hacker News [2])
and it seems like at the time it was introduced, chroot() was rather
simplistic in implementation and was nothing more than a way of specifying to
Unix, “when you see a leading ‘/’ replace it with this path.” It seems
security was an afterthought.

It also reminded me of this bit of Unix history, courtesy of The Bell System
Technical Journal, Volume 57, Number 6, Part 2 (July–August 1978), which
shows just how loose everything was in early versions of Unix:

> The file system structure allows an arbitrary, directed graph of
> directories with regular files linked in at arbitrary places in this graph.
> In fact, very early UNIX systems used such a structure. Administration of
> such a structure become so chaotic that later systems were restricted to a
> directory tree.
> 

[1] https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/ChrootHistory
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10160507

Email Sean Conner at sean@conman.org

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