Erroneous "Insecure world writable dir foo in PATH" when running ruby script

Question

When I run a ruby script, it gives me this:

[nathanb@nathanb-box ~] myscript .
/u/nathanb/bin/myscript:173: warning: Insecure world writable dir /usr/software/test/bin in PATH, mode 043777
/u/nathanb/bin/myscript:74: warning: Insecure world writable dir /usr/software/test/bin in PATH, mode 043777
/u/nathanb/bin/myscript:79: warning: Insecure world writable dir /usr/software/test/bin in PATH, mode 043777

This message is erroneous, because /usr/software is mounted read-only:

software:/vol/software/  on  /usr/software             type  nfs         (ro,noatime,intr,rsize=32768,wsize=32768,timeo=600,nolock,addr=10.60.132.45,nfsvers=3,proto=tcp,mountproto=udp)

And I can verify this:

nathanb@nathanb-box /usr/software/test/bin] touch foo
touch: cannot touch `foo': Read-only file system

I believe my mount point has the correct permissions:

[nathanb@nathanb-box /usr] ls -ld /usr/software
drwxr-xr-x 27 root root 4096 2010-09-10 17:12 /usr/software

So two questions:

• Could this legitimately be considered a bug in Ruby?
• How do I shut this up? Is there a way to disable only this specific warning?

Answer 1

We had this situation at work, and although it would be nice to just fix the permissions, that wasn't possible in our environment. Instead, I created the following wrapper script for ruby that suppresses the error.

#!/bin/bash
(ruby.orig "$@" 3>&1 1>&2 2>&3 | grep -v 'Insecure world writable dir'; exit ${PIPESTATUS[0]}) 3>&1 1>&2 2>&3

Just rename the ruby executable to ruby.orig and drop this script into the ruby bin directory in it's place.

See this excellent explanation for how this works.

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Another fix for this issue (which avoids the wrapper script) is to compile Ruby with CPPFLAGS="-D ENABLE_PATH_CHECK=0" set when you run ./configure.