>  No, it would be 700, or 744 at most.  You don't want other users to
>  be able to write to your temp directory; that way they can inject any
>  code they want into your program.
>    
Hmm, I think we have a misunderstanding?

I'm sure the pdk-* dirs placed in the tmp dir root (wherever it is) 
should have something like you describe (even though I'm seeing 755 
here). However, if I perlapp'ed something using '--tmpdir /tmp/foo' I 
would expect it to create 'foo' with something wide open, and *inside* 
that place the protected pdk-* dir(s). If it made 'foo' 700, it would 
defeat it all as only the first user running the app would later be able 
to run it again...

>  All the code implementing this will have to be written in C, might be
>  different for each platform and will be in the part of the code included
>  in every single generated PerlApp.
> 
>  So I definitely don't want to overengineer it, and I'm also wary of
>  introducing potential problems/vulnerabilities for the majority of
>  the users who will never use this mechanism.
>    
Fully understand, and agree.

>  So I thing creating the --tmpdir directory if it doesn't exist makes
>  sense, and maybe allowing to specify an environment variable
>  instead of a static PATH might be reasonable too.  But any kind of
>  cascading fallbacks (if the environment variable isn't set), or
>  a more complex variable substitution sublanguage, or setting different
>  mode bits etc are all too much complicated.
>    
After some thought, I actually think you could keep everything else 
intact and just add the capability of creating a missing dir. Assuming 
you don't see a big problem, hardwiring the behavior of 'create if 
missing with mode 777' would probably be quite adequate. Skip the idea 
of using another envvar, I don't think it gives enough value.

I guess that it could be worthwhile to add some incantation to turn on 
that behavior as people using --tmpdir today wouldn't expect it. In the 
spirit of -bind, perhaps something like:

    perlapp --tmpdir /tmp/foo[createifnotexists] ...

or something similar, I'm sure you can come up with something less 
unwieldy :-), but that would allow future expansion if someone ever 
comes up with a plausible and acceptable need for something even more 
complicated.

ken1
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