Setting permissions in DJGPP.ENV

[Ersin Akinci]

Hi all,

I was wondering if it's possible to set UNIX-like permissions for
arbitrary files through DJGPP.ENV. I'm trying to use a DOS port of
Mutt (the e-mail client) to check my mail on an SSL-encrypted IMAP
server, but OpenSSL requires /dev/random to generate entropy for
encryption. Since DOS has no such file, you can pass it a "randfile"
manually that contains hand-edited random data or you can use the
"noise" driver (available at http://www.rahul.net/dkaufman/) to
generate a random file at C:\.rnd. The problem is that Mutt checks
the permissions on this file, which in a *nix environment would be a
device node at /dev/random, and requires them to be set to 600. Now,
although DOS doesn't support permissions, when I check the permissions
of my custom randfile or the .rnd file generated by the noise driver
using ls.exe provided by DJGPP it returns 644 (r/w owner, r group, r
everyone).

I tried fiddling around with attrib and chmod, but there's no way to
disable access to "non-dosuser" users through those programs. My
alternatives at this point are to either find some other way to fake
the permissions or hack Mutt/OpenSSL not to check for permissions and
recompile. Obviously the first would be preferable! Another
alternative would be to use another DOS e-mail client that supports
SSL, but I haven't been able to find one. I also tried using HX DOS
Extender to maybe get a simple Win32 SSL-capable mail client to work,
but I've been unsuccessful so far...

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Ersin

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Wed, 28 Oct 2009 13:33:05 -0400
> From: Ersin Akinci <ersin....@gmail.com>

I think about the only good alternative would be to hack Mutt not to
require this on DOS.