.plan

[Fuat C. Baran]

In article <28110 at news.Think.COM> barmar at think.com (Barry Margolin) writes:
>I think it's Unix that needs to be fixed.  Multics's (and some other
>systems') solution to this problem is that the tty driver normally
>translates most control characters to octal escapes or ^<char>
>sequences.  Applications that need to send control sequences to the
>terminal can put the terminal in raw output mode, but by default
>terminals are not in raw output mode.

I still think that the ability to send back arbitrary strings is too
dangerous to be enabled by default in terminals.  User's should be
aware of it when they enable that capability.  What's to prevent a
nasty user from creating a /tmp/RUN-ME program that puts the tty in
raw output mode and then does bad things?  Regardless of what the
default action of the terminal driver is, if a program can change it
and send junk to an unsuspecting user's terminal, then the user is in
danger.

>Programmable function keys are useful for some things, so telling the
>users to turn off this feature when using Unix is the wrong answer.
>With this "solution", every time a user goes into or out of an
>application that makes use of function key programming he'd have to
>change the set-up configuration.  For novice computer users, this
>could be quite confusiong.

Just out of curiosity, what unix applications make use of a terminal's
capability to rebind function keys and/or have it type back arbitrary
data on command?  (No, this is not a sarcastic comment, but a genuine
question. I don't think I've ever run across an application that
required that capability from my terminal other than silly programs
written as jokes by friends.)


						--Fuat
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