Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bu-cs!bzs
From: bzs@bu-cs.BU.EDU (Barry Shein)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Down in the Dumps (a true story)
Message-ID: <22872@bu-cs.BU.EDU>
Date: 25 May 88 16:52:07 GMT
References: <406@thirdi.UUCP>
Organization: Boston U. Comp. Sci.
Lines: 23
In-reply-to: peter@thirdi.UUCP's message of 19 May 88 22:13:13 GMT


Although the problem you point out is clearly a misfeature/bug (dump
not checking its arguments carefully enough) I think a better approach
would be to write shell or c programs to act as wrappers and thus can
be customized to do whatever checking (including local heuristics) you
want.

Part of the problem (eg. the rm * problem etc) is that people seem to
assume that every command (particularly ones used by priv'd accts)
must be used exactly as is and should have been developed to work as
such. To some extent you're right and it's always a judgement call,
but in terms of dumps I would consider the /etc/dump command just
another operator like if[] or echo to use to write a command script
around, typing directly into memory and jumping to zero has its
hazards.

Note: I don't advocate REPLACING commands or presenting wrappers as
fundamentals, but with some commands (particularly complicated ones
like dump) shell scripts can do much more to cure the problem you
encountered than hacking in a little more arg checking code to the
original command.

	-Barry Shein, Boston University