Re: egrep moved to /usr/sbin
On Mon, Jan 06, 2003 at 01:18:51PM -0700, Eric Schwartz wrote:
> On Mon, 2003-01-06 at 12:41, Craig Dickson wrote:
> > There is merit in having egrep and fgrep available under those names,
> > because people will expect them. They don't have to be in any particular
> > place as long as they're on the standard $PATH, since programs shouldn't
> > be hard-coding the locations of binaries from other packages.
>
> Not so; it prevents a potential security problem from users who have
> insecure PATH settings. By hardcoding the locations of binaries, you
> prevent them from screwing themselves up that way.
Setting PATH=/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin (perhaps including
/usr/local/{bin,sbin} too) or some such is more robust.
> Also, you can prevent aliases from screwing up your program's output:
> I've found numerous bugs in shell scripts that were caused by my
> aliasing ls to 'ls -FCs', and fixed by forcing ls to /bin/ls.
You could use 'command ls' instead.
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]
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