Unix Administration Horror Stories (1993)

Re:Unix Administration Horror Stories (1993) by ciupicri on Wednesday September 02, 2015 @10:12PM (#10163047)

If root's PATH environment variable can be compromised, then you might as well ditch the whole system.

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Re:Unix Administration Horror Stories (1993) by dredmorbius on Wednesday September 02, 2015 @10:30PM (#10163090)

It may not be common practice (I typically rely on $PATH). But it is, as I noted, defensive.

There are numerous ways in which $PATH can change. Shared profiles and other users modifying root's init among them. Intent isn't necessarily malicious. It can still be unexpected.

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Re:Unix Administration Horror Stories (1993) by rhinoceraptor on Wednesday September 02, 2015 @11:57PM (#10163273)

There was a Steam script that had a nasty habit of running '# rm /*' due to an empty script variable.

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Re:Unix Administration Horror Stories (1993) by dredmorbius on Thursday September 03, 2015 @06:06AM (#10164086)

I do not trust vendor scripts.

Really fscking annoying: scripts that include inline binary data.

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