.plan

[David H. Brierley]

In article <4531 at orca.WV.TEK.COM> garyc at quasi.tek.com (Gary Combs;685-2072;60-720;;tekecs) writes:
>
>If your display understands ansi commands, you could append your .plan with
>cursor movement and character insert commands.

Hey, this is a wonderful idea!!  Lets have everybody put all sorts of ansi
escape sequences into their .plan files so that they can draw cute little
animated pictures on their screens.  Maybe someone could post a copy of the
xmas tree with the little train going around.  Of course, you need to make
sure you lock your office door whenver someone who has an HP terminal, or a
Zenith terminal, or any other non-ansi terminal runs the finger command and it
mangles the settings on their terminal beyond recognition.  (if you can't see
the sarcasm dripping off of this, a cute little smiley is not going to help)

On all of the systems that I administor, I have changed the finger command so
that it catches any control characters in the .plan and prints them out using
the "caret" notation that vi (and other programs) uses.  I think that at least
some versions of 4.3BSD have a similar change to the finger program.  At
least, our More/BSD systems (which are supposed to contain most of the stuff
from 4.3-tahoe) use the same type of mechanism when processing the .plan file
and I think they do the same for the .project file.  Aside from the annoyance
factor resulting from sending control sequences that were intended for one
type of terminal to a different type of terminal, the unrestricted use of
control sequences in the .plan file is major security hole.  If there are any
systems out there that that are running an old finger program that still
allows control characters in the .plan file I strongly recommend that you make
the appropriate changes the your finger program.  If you do not know exactly
wha to change, send me mail and I will tell you.  If you do not have source
code, I think the finger program was released as part of the freely
redistributable code and should be available from a number of places.
-- 
David H. Brierley
Home: dave at galaxia.Newport.RI.US   {rayssd,xanth,lazlo,mirror,att}!galaxia!dave
Work: dhb at rayssd.ray.com           {sun,uunet,gatech,necntc,ukma}!rayssd!dhb