Re: [UUG/MLUG] Running C programs

[Jonathan King <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On Sun, 2 Jan 2000 EMAIL:PROTECTED wrote:

> I feel obligated to note that while making your life easy, adding "."
> to your path if you are running as root is an inherently dangerous
> thing.

Well, yeah, that's certainly a classic way of getting owned.  But having
"." in your path can truly ruin your day even if you aren't root, most
obviously if you cd around and type "ls" a lot in random places. While I
was at CMU, one clown managed to trash people by putting an executable
called "sl" in one of his public directories.  ("sl" is a common typo for
"ls", of course.)  I'll leave it to your collective evil imaginations what
"sl" could do...

Sometimes you will hear that it's okay to have "." in your path if you
save it for last, but that alone won't prevent a "typo attack", for
starters.  I'm sure others may beg to differ, but it's just not a very 
good idea...

jking