There certainly are risks when you are writing files, but I don't see making a general rule of this. In the case of the flogger node, the issue starts with the use of msg.filename, which is shared with the core file nodes and perhaps others. As suggested above, the risk of error could be reduced by instead using msg.logfile (or better yet, msg.flogger.logfile) for this property. Also, the node configuration allows the user to define a Log Dir , which can help isolate any damage to that directory. I have used a strategy for overriding defaults that greatly reduces the chance of errors. I name properties that can be overridden as msg.nodename.property, so that for flogger the overrides object might be
msg.flogger = {
logfile: "mylog.log",
loglevel: "INFO"
};
The chance of a message accidentally carrying something like this into a flogger node is very small, but the node could still have defaults configured to deal with the case where the message doesn't provide valid parameters.
