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Vuln-Dev Archives: Re: Unix * weirdness

Re: Unix * weirdness

Subject: Re: Unix * weirdness
From: Blue Boar (BlueBoarTHIEVCO.COM)
Date: Sat Jan 01 2000 - 21:29:20 CST

"Andrew W. Flury" wrote:

> > /usr/bin/rm -rf /tmp/*
>
> The above command would work properly with a file named "-foo" in /tmp. The
> shell would simply replace /tmp/* with /tmp/-foo (among other things), which
> isn't parsed by getopt(3). There is only a problem here if the script did
> something like "cd /tmp && rm -rf *".

How about if it's -foo with a space in front? The /tmp example is
a bad one... the point is to delete all files and subdirectories
anyway, so perhaps that's why Sun ships with the above statement.

I have to wonder if I could get the rm to choke, and therefore the script
to abort. That would allow files to stick around between reboots in /tmp.
A pretty minor problem.

> All of these characters are interpreted BEFORE the glob (*) is expanded, so
> they should work just fine. The only exception would be if the programmer
> does something dumb like passing the glob to eval.

That was one of the key questions I was trying to ask.

                                                BB

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