• From: "Liam R. E. Quin" <liam@f...>
• To: Michael Kay <mike@s...>, Dimitre Novatchev <dnovatchev@g...>
• Date: Sun, 14 Aug 2022 21:01:55 -0400

On Sun, 2022-08-14 at 23:02 +0100, Michael Kay wrote:
> 
> . The program needs read and write access to the file, but the user
> playing the game must be prohibited from accessing the file directly.

On Unix this was traditionally done with a "pseudo-user" - a user
account that existed just for the program, e.g. "moo" in this case. It
would own the file, and the game would run setuid, which means that
regardless of who ran it, the program would run with the effective
user-id of "moo", and hence could read the score file.

liam

-- 
Liam Quin, https://www.delightfulcomputing.com/
Available for XML/Document/Information Architecture/XSLT/
XSL/XQuery/Web/Text Processing/A11Y training, work & consulting.
Barefoot Web-slave, antique illustrations:  http://www.fromoldbooks.org

• References:
  • Formatless files
    • From: Roger L Costello <costello@m...>
  • RE: Formatless files
    • From: Roger L Costello <costello@m...>
  • Fwd: RE: Formatless files
    • From: Dimitre Novatchev <dnovatchev@g...>
  • Re: Formatless files
    • From: Michael Kay <mike@s...>