I'm able to reproduce Matt's simple test case on Unix and Windows. Hopefully it's a reasonably good representation of the other problems people are experiencing. Looks like the `allowSymlinkEscape` property isn't working the way it was intended. I'll see if I can figure something out to make it work better. It may take a while to get that change put together.

Same here, been running with SymlinkEscape=true for quite a while.

Hi Jeff,

We have been running with "-Dhudson.model.DirectoryBrowserSupport.allowSymlinkEscape=true" for quite a while already. The setting does not resolve the current issue.

Glenn Herbert and Arjo Poldervaart, thanks for your responses on describing your use models. That helps clarify some things.

Have you read the security advisory from last year at https://jenkins.io/security/advisory/2018-12-05/ ? Have you tried disabling that fix via the system property described there? It sounds like your use cases are some of the rare situations where that might make sense.

Our use is similar to that of Glenn. To provide some context:

If we want to release an artifact to production, we tag it in our SCM and let Jenkins build it, Jenkins then copies the artifact to a different location so we can download it at a later time (even if the workspace is cleared). The copy is done via a symlink created in the workspace by our build script (soft link on Linux) to a folder outside the workspace on disk.

When we want to deploy the artifact we can simply download it via een link like: /view/assets/job/assets-BootstrapPortlet/ws/RELEASES/1.0.2/BootstrapPortletEAR.ear

The _RELEASES_ folder __ is a symlink. So we basically use Jenkins as a file server just like Glenn.

We do not use symlinks in the userContent folder, but we do use it in the job workspace.