Re: Commands and Utilities Proposal, 0.2

[Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>]

> Issue 5 vs. 20 pages for mailx), and doesn't have any ~ escapes. The
> only conflicts are where mailx in fact provides an enhanced version of
> the mail command, and most scripts depend on the funcionality
> described. Basically, mailx leaves off a couple of arguments that
> might be used by legacy scripts depending on some of the old mail
> functionality (e.g. -p or -t), while most scripts actually depend on
> mailx funcionality from mail. I believe the BSD mailx acts like this
> already, and I know that the GNU mailutils mailx program will (since
> I'm writing it).

There have been several security holes and incidents caused by folks using 
mailx as mail in web forms. In paticular things like

 Hello
 ~!rm -rf /home/httpd/html/*

is mishandled by mailx used as mail 8)