| ▲ | jkercher 6 hours ago |
| Tangentially related. Don't ever put "." in your PATH. I used to do this to avoid typing the "./" to execute something in my current directory. BAD IDEA. It can turn a typo into a fork bomb. I took down a production server trying to save typing two characters. |
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| ▲ | mathfailure 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| I like to follow my own convention where I name files with shell scripts with an extension: .sh for POSIX-compatible scripts, .bash for scripts with bashisms or .zsh for scripts with zshisms. If I ever wanted to achieve what you initially wanted to achieve - I could use something like alias -s sh=sh alias -s bash=bash alias -s zsh=zsh Just like I do bind .txt and .conf to 'less', .pdf to 'qpdf', .json to 'ijq', video formats to 'mpv' and so on. |
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| ▲ | marcosdumay 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It used to be very common to "own" a unix system by adding a `ls` binary in some folder and waiting for an administrator to run it. |
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| ▲ | zahlman 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Might I ask exactly what the typo was? |
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| ▲ | lanyard-textile 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Elaborate?? "." has been at the end of my PATH for like 20 years. |
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| ▲ | zelphirkalt 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Why does this go wrong and in what situation? |
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| ▲ | necovek an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Somebody mentioned it elsewhere, but it is a security risk: if you end up in a directory that's not under your control, and you do a "ls", it might execute "./ls" instead of /usr/bin/ls, and that can be doing anything, including piping your ~/.ssh/id_* to a remote server. This can also happen by downloading something off the internet (git clone, or tar xz foo.tar.gz), or on a multi-user system (eg. someone can put any of these common commands into /tmp/ and wait for you to drop into it and try a "ls" there) — if you have any untrusted content anywhere, you are exposed. | |
| ▲ | Kiboneu 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | A trip down the recursion hole. Also, scripts will inherit the relative path so they will have different absolute paths from each other. Seems easier to just type ./ so it's kinda funny in a "UNIX haters handbook" kind of way, but it's not even a fault in linux's command interface in that case. We've all been there. Oh, that's without even going into the security risks and loss of portability. | |
| ▲ | renewiltord 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Presumably a script that aliases a common thing or something and then it uses the same. E.g. someone adds ./sed that has some default params and calls sed. You’re intended to call it with ~/not-in-path/defaulted/sed and it is supposed to then call sed but instead calls itself if it’s earlier in the path hierarchy. Might even be as simple as “detect if I’m running gnu sed or bsd sed and use the appropriate one”. Obviously you can not have this problem by being smart about other things but defense in depth right? |
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| ▲ | Kiboneu 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| lol. What a beautiful footgun — for such a tiny optimization. |
