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From: levy@mtcchi.uucp (2656-Daniel R. Levy(0000000)0000)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.shell,comp.lang.perl
Subject: Re: Beware xargs security holes
Message-ID: <1990Oct29.055826.3814@mtcchi.uucp>
Date: 29 Oct 90 05:58:26 GMT
References: <63404@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu> <1990Oct9.172621.13484@cbnews.att.com> <271653D6.1CE8@tct.uucp> <4062:Oct1518:22:1290@kramden.acf.nyu.edu> <3186@unisoft.UUCP>
Organization: Memorex Telex Corporation NSBG/STP
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>>But it's still susceptible to filenames with carriage returns, and will
>>be until find has a -print0 option. Please, please, please don't claim
>>that your xargs is by any means secure when a standard command like
>>
>>  find / -name '#*' -atime +7 -print | xargs rm
>>
>>lets a malicious user remove every file on the system. Maybe it's
>>unreasonable of me to want others to live up to my standard of security,
>>but in my eyes no \n-parsing xargs qualifies as ``a good job.'' Sorry.

For a brief moment there I thought one could do an end run by telling
find not to match files whose names contain newline (e.g. ! -name '*^J*'
where ^J is an actual newline character).  But alas, that does not exclude
files within directories whose names (the directories' that is) contain
newlines.  Oh well.
-- 
* Daniel R. Levy *  uunet!tellab5!mtcchi!levy *                        |
* These views are live; they are not Memorex' *                      --+--
"Because we love something else more than this world we love even      |
this world better than those who know no other" -- C. S. Lewis         |