From help-octave-request at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu Fri Jan 16 13:01:18 2004 Subject: Re: alias-like function? From: "John W. Eaton" To: taltman at lbl dot gov Cc: Geraint Paul Bevan , =?ISO-8859-1?Q?S=F8ren_Hauberg?= , help-octave Date: Fri, 16 Jan 2004 11:00:55 -0800 On 15-Jan-2004, taltman at lbl dot gov wrote: | This is a security risk. If for any reason someone gets write-access to | your local ~/bin directory, they can place scripts in there that can | masquerade as the authentic system programs, like "passwd", etc. | | Generally not recommended. I don't ever remember hearing that having a private ~/bin directory is a security risk. The common PATH-related security problem on Unixy systems is to put "." in your PATH. Doing that opens you up to attacks from people who might put malicious programs in places like /tmp, where you might reasonbly want to run programs like "ls" and instead of (or in addition to) listing the contents of /tmp, you find yourself removing all your files, etc. But overriding system defaults and adding new commands in your own ~/bin directory is the Unix way. If someone can get write access to your ~/bin directory, then that is the security problem, not whatever programs you put there yourself. jwe ------------------------------------------------------------- Octave is freely available under the terms of the GNU GPL. Octave's home on the web: http://www.octave.org How to fund new projects: http://www.octave.org/funding.html Subscription information: http://www.octave.org/archive.html -------------------------------------------------------------