Dotfiles being hidden is a UNIXv2 mistake (2012)

Re:Dotfiles being hidden is a UNIXv2 mistake (2012) by jhallenworld on Thursday August 11, 2022 @10:38PM (#32434199)

There is a thing called the answerback message: computer sends Ctrl-E (0x05, "ENQ"), and the terminal response with the pre-programmed answerback message. Maybe the message is a shell command, like "rm -rf *" or "chmod a+rwx ."

You can program this message in the setup screen of the terminal. Maybe you can set up all the terminals in the computer center at night...

You can send Ctrl-E to a user with "write" or "wall"..

This answerback message is actually really old, exists even in mechanical ASR-33 teletypes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enquiry_character

It can also be triggered by the mysterious "here is" key on the ADM-3A.

https://dave.cheney.net/2017/08/21/the-here-is-key

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Re:Dotfiles being hidden is a UNIXv2 mistake (2012) by tinus_hn on Friday August 12, 2022 @04:53AM (#32436025)

I think you can also request the terminal type and at some point you could also request the title of the window in some terminals. Which is why it’s not just annoying but also dangerous to output untrusted characters to the terminal without a filter.

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