What's so special about uudecode?

[Jeff Beadles]

In <3317 at mrsvr.UUCP> krieg at titan.med.ge.com (Andrew Krieg) writes:

>uudecode has some special characteristics at my site.  We are running a large
>Sun network, using SunOS 3.5.  uudecode will only work in the /tmp or
>/usr/tmp directories.  If you try to run it, say in your home directory, you
>get the error:

>filename: Permission denied
...
>Anyone have a clue as to why this is?  The man pages sure don't list this as
>a feature.  Is there perhaps something wrong with the configuration or
>installation at my site?

Well, on some Sun's I've been told that uuencode/decode is suid.
This is a silly, mindless thing to do (IMHO, of course :-).

With this, the directory that you are uudecoding into MUST be either
publically writable, or at least writable by the owner of the uudecode
program.


One thing that you could do is to put it in a private directory without
being setuid.  Ie:

% echo $PATH
/usr/jeff/.bin:/bin:/usr/bin:...

(Note that my private .bin is first in my path before the system's /bin)

cp /bin/uuencode ~/.bin/uuencode    (Do the same for uudecode)
chmod 755 ~/.bin/uuencode           (Do the same for uudecode)

Then, it should run as a normal program (hopefully)  If not, either
complain loudly to Sun, or go to uunet and get the BSD free'd version
and compile it.

	-Jeff
-- 
Jeff Beadles		jeff at onion.pdx.com