Re: egrep moved to /usr/sbin
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. 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.
-=Eric
--
Eric Schwartz <emschwar@debian.org>
Debian GNU/Linux Software Project
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