rm etc. (was: Nasty Security Hole?)

Guy Harris guy at auspex.UUCP
Thu Dec 1 17:57:24 AEST 1988


>There is more reason to doubt UUNET:

Hell, I tried it a few hours ago on "uunet", and it worked the way
Richard said it did on a Sequent.  The "rm: remove foo?" prompt looks
suspiciously like a "rm -i" prompt; perhaps on the systems where it was
seen, "rm" was a script, shell function (or, if "ksh", alias) for
"rm -i"?

>Internationalisation will be a great opportunity to tidy this up.

Yup, it'll get put into a file, probably; with any luck, users will be
able to generate their own files, so you can get

	rm: overrideway rotectionpay 644 orfay /etc/passwd?

On a more serious note, putting messages into files may have other
advantages, such as

	1) having people other than programmers write them (even if we
	   write our native languages well, we may not know the best way
	   to express what the message is trying to say)

and

	2) providing a nice database or databases listing all system
	   messages, so you can consider listing them along with
	   explanations for the perplexed, if the creator of the message
	   in 1) can't make them self-explanatory.



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