How Hard Is It to Open a File?

A simple question—“How hard is it to open a file?”—turned into a full‑blown drama thread. The post argues that filenames can lie, attackers can swap paths mid‑click, and the only safe move for privileged tools is to use a stable “handle” to the file, not the file’s name. Think of it as holding a numbered ticket rather than trusting a scribbled note. Cue the comments. One camp shrugged: don’t overthink it. As TZubiri put it, fix the actual bug and lean on standard protections like SELinux (a system safety policy) and plain old user accounts. Others fired back with receipts: this is how a Flatpak sandbox got escaped, pointing to a real advisory link. Then came the spicy meta-drama—croemer praised the explanation but jabbed that parts read “LLM-like,” and suddenly the thread was debating AI authorship as much as file handles. Skeptics like jshmrsn pressed the threat model: is this a true bug or just a way to escalate once an attacker already has a foothold? Meanwhile, practical minds asked if you can simply open the file with the caller’s rights and pass that handle along—yes, say the handle‑pilled crowd. Bonus twist: codethief warned that AI agents “sandboxed” by app code might fall for the same path tricks. The memes wrote themselves: open() and pray vs FD or GTFO.