Re: chflags -RL and symlinks pointing outside the traversal: preserve behavior or add a Capsicum guardrail?

On Thu, Aug 20, 2026 at 7:49 PM Konstantin Belousov <kostikbel@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> IMO there must be an option to disable the capability mode.
> Ideally, the option would be consistent across most of the utilities.
>
> Also, if we are talking about making the capsicum entry semi-mandatory,
> as the first step we should remove the CAPABILITIES/CAPABILITY_MODE
> options from kernel build. (To make it clear, make the features
> unconditional).

I definitely agree with making capsicum mandatory in the kernel.  It's
certainly mature enough to be required by now.  As for a switch to
disable it, we're proposing --dereference-links-unsafely in the linked
PR.  That name makes sense for chflags (and chmod, chown, etc), and
doesn't assume that the user knows what "capsicum" means.  But it
wouldn't make sense for very many utilities that don't have a -R
option.  Would you like a different name?

https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-src/pull/2375