Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcsun!ukc!slxsys!ibmpcug!robobar!ronald
From: ronald@robobar.co.uk (Ronald S H Khoo)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: How to prevent VI from getting a shell?
Message-ID: <1990Sep17.210110.26060@robobar.co.uk>
Date: 17 Sep 90 21:01:10 GMT
References: <501@trux.UUCP> <570@DIALix.UUCP>
Organization: Robobar Ltd., Perivale, Middx., ENGLAND.
Lines: 15

In article <570@DIALix.UUCP> bernie@DIALix.oz.au (Bernd Felsche) writes:

> set SHELL in the environment to something which doest nothing, say
> /bin/true.  vi forks-execs whatever SHELL is defined to be, or the
> shell if undefined.

I don't know about *your* version of vi, but mine lets you defeat this
by doing :set shell=/bin/sh

I got around the problem by binary patching out the call to fork() in
vi.  Ugh.  Also, I never found a way to defeat letting the user read and
write files other than the current file.  Any offers ?

-- 
my .signature is on holiday