Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!unmvax!ncar!tank!shamash!nic.MR.NET!hal!ncoast!allbery
From: allbery@NCoast.ORG (Brandon S. Allbery)
Newsgroups: comp.sources.d
Subject: Re: Safer unsharing
Message-ID: <1989Oct15.010515.27098@NCoast.ORG>
Date: 15 Oct 89 01:05:15 GMT
References: <15018@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> <1008@crdos1.crd.ge.COM>
Reply-To: allbery@ncoast.ORG (Brandon S. Allbery)
Followup-To: comp.sources.d
Organization: North Coast Public Access UN*X, Cleveland, OH
Lines: 30

As quoted from <1008@crdos1.crd.ge.COM> by davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.COM (Wm E Davidsen Jr):
+---------------
|   Either of these are a pain to set up and use. If there were a better
| way to pass files around shar would have died long ago. Since everyone
| has /bin/sh the true shar format is very convenient.
+---------------

How about a GNU version of ar, expanded to include directories?  Both System V
and Berzerkeley use ASCII ar format now, and the two differ by exactly *one*
character per archive entry (BSD uses a space, USG uses a `).

+---------------
|   For SysV users a SysV /bin/sh (that's a lot of us these days) a
| directory may be created which holds a few common commands, then the
| restricted shell with a limited path may be run, something like:
| 	PATH=/limitedbin; readonly PATH
| 	set -r
| 	. sharfile
+---------------

...which will fail the first time you run one of those shars whose first
executable line is "PATH=/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/ucb export PATH"....

++Brandon
-- 
Brandon S. Allbery, moderator of comp.sources.misc	     allbery@NCoast.ORG
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