When . is valid in PATH

gwyn at BRL.ARPA gwyn at BRL.ARPA
Sat Apr 5 11:51:54 AEST 1986


WHAT "problem" is this horrible kludge attempting to address?

If you feel the need to have "." in your $PATH, put it last
and you will never run booby traps instead of standard system
utilities.

Better yet, leave "." out of your $PATH and explicitly invoke
executables in the current directory as "./whatever" when you
do want to run them.

Anyone who runs unknown executables "just to see what they do"
is too stupid for any amount of automatic protection; the fool
would probably just make a copy of the executable in his own
directory and run it anyway.

Geez, guys, this is UNIX.  We don't need non-solutions to
non-problems embedded in it.



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