[New-bugs-announce] [issue32887] os: Users of path_converter don't handle fd == -1 properly

[Alexey Izbyshev]

New submission from Alexey Izbyshev <izbyshev at ispras.ru>:

Demo:
>>> import os
>>> os.chdir(-1)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
OSError: [Errno 14] Bad address: -1
>>> os.chdir(-2)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
OSError: [Errno 9] Bad file descriptor: -2

Functions in os supporting either path or file descriptor argument (os.supports_fd) usually use the following code pattern to distinguish between those cases:

    if (path->fd != -1)
        result = fchdir(path->fd);
    else
        result = chdir(path->narrow);

However, _fd_converter used by path_converter internally doesn't give any special meaning to -1 and allows any negative file descriptors. Therefore, if a user passes -1 to such function, path->narrow, which is NULL, will be used.

I see two ways to fix this.
1) Make some flag in path_t indicating that it should be treated as fd and make all users check that flag.
2) Make _fd_converter raise an exception for negative descriptors.

Also, I have to mention an inconsistency in reporting of bad descriptors. A handful of os functions uses fildes_converter for descriptors, which uses PyObject_AsFileDescriptor, which in turn is used in other places in Python as well (e.g. in fcntl module). PyObject_AsFileDescriptor raises a ValueError for negative descriptors instead of OSError raised by most os functions in this case.

>>> os.fchdir(-1)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
ValueError: file descriptor cannot be a negative integer (-1)

----------
messages: 312421
nosy: izbyshev
priority: normal
severity: normal
status: open
title: os: Users of path_converter don't handle fd == -1 properly
type: behavior
versions: Python 3.6, Python 3.7

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Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<https://bugs.python.org/issue32887>
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