[rurban]

Reminds me more on Perl naming conventions. Take an arbitrary non technical expression, where established names already do exist, but clash with the semantics.

Also the usage of strings for flags and not int bits just let me cry out. This is pure nonsense.

[gshrikant]

Pledge (previously `tame`) did use bitmasks in its earlier iterations. See Ted Unangst's post about it: https://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/string-interfaces

[rurban]

I know this change, that's why I bothered. He can do this in his private app as he likes, but not in the libc which is the most widely copied libc. It's about security, consistency and being a positive role model.

[rjvbk]

I don't like it, it's un-C-like.

[arcticbull]

Too many vowels? Would you prefer 'pldg' ? ;) Unless you meant the stringly-typed arguments in which case I'm 100% with you, they're asking for trouble.

[tedunangst]

It's like everything else in openbsd. The people who don't use it don't like it; the people who live with it every day for years realize benefits the haters don't perceive.

[anilakar]

Maybe Theo wanted fopen-like semantics?

[bonzini]

fopen is not a system call, it is a library call. The system call is open, and it uses bits for flags.

[int_19h]

Which makes it that much harder to extend.

There's nothing wrong with the use of strings here. It's very readable, easily understandable to anyone who knows C, can be checked by automated tools (or at runtime) for invalid values, and is easily extensible in the future. It's also not on a hot path (I mean, you shouldn't have to do this at any point other than process creation).

[therein]

Right but is there really any reason why the implementation should call strncmp or anything that would be costlier than a bitwise AND? It's not like "r" reads better than O_RDONLY.

[codetrotter]

Pledge happens on process startup only, so since it’s not like it is called over and over again during the life of the process, the overhead is certainly negligible for all modern servers, desktops and laptops.

[microtonal]

But compiler errors (typo in a flag) become runtime errors (typo in the unveil string).