Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!bellcore!faline!thumper!ulysses!andante!alice!debra
From: debra@alice.UUCP (Paul De Bra)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: ?????  HELP!!! what is wrong with this code? ???????
Message-ID: <8312@alice.UUCP>
Date: 18 Oct 88 22:58:48 GMT
References: <456@mrsvr.UUCP> <8271@alice.UUCP> <561@micropen> <10146@cup.portal.com>
Reply-To: debra@alice.UUCP ()
Organization: AT&T, Bell Labs
Lines: 24

In article <10146@cup.portal.com> thad@cup.portal.com (Thad Thad Floryan) writes:
>Doug Gwyn writes: "It is not wise to have the current directory early
>in the PATH directory list."
>

I fully agree with Doug. Having the current directory early in the PATH
makes you very succeptible to trojan horses.

If you go to someone elses directory (don't tell me you never do this) and
execute a command, say ls, or wc, you do not want to be executing a program
with that name which accidently exists in this directory and does something
silly like "rm -r $HOME".

And root certainly does not want to have the current directory in the path,
when he does something like "find /usr -name core -exec rm \{\} \;"

The only problem with NOT having the current directory early in the PATH
is that many beginners call their first program "test".

Paul.
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