Anomalous output from getpcaps(1) for process with all capabilities

[Michael Kerrisk (man-pages)]

Hello Andrew,

On Sun, 15 Dec 2019 at 19:30, Andrew G. Morgan <morgan at kernel.org> wrote:
>
> This changed with this commit I think:
>
> https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/libs/libcap/libcap.git/commit/libcap/cap_text.c?id=3fa808f5886d08c45866217cfe6e6e9def7de04e
>
> Prior to that, we had "=ep" mean the cap set was ~0 for
> all the bitmasks in e and p. When we started to clip the
>bounding set to only defined capabilities, it meant that the
> text output started to look like
> "=ep 33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41,42.....63-ep" which
> was quite terrible.

Was that really the change that caused this? That's a 2008 commit.
Certainly, I recall in 2014 or 2015 still being able to see =ep, and I
presume (but do not recall for sure) that I was using a system with a
libcap more recent than v2.11 (of which that commit was a part).

> So, this was seen as the least worst option.

But surely this is fixable? Or, to put it another was, I presume
there's something that makes this difficult to fix in getpcaps, but
what is that something?

Thanks,

Michael

-- 
Michael Kerrisk
Linux man-pages maintainer; http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/
Linux/UNIX System Programming Training: http://man7.org/training/