Re: % in $PATH

[Stephane Chazelas <stephane.chazelas@gmail.com>]

2014-11-10 22:59:38 +0100, Guido Berhoerster:
[...]
> A much nicer solution would be to do something similar to the
> original Korn shell and assign additional builtins a virtual
> path which can be freely assigned in PATH and with which they can
> be explicitly called. No more "%" in PATH and the feature can
> be retained.
[...]

Sounds to me like it's what dash does. It has %builtin (or
/%builtin) where ksh93 has /opt/ast/bin.

With ksh93, that's only for a few extra builtins that are only
enabled if you add /opt/ast/bin to $PATH (or you can call them
with "command /opt/ast/bin/cat").

I wouldn't say it's much better, it's still bad as being the
hijacking of one namespace for something else.

dash's %builtin (as opposed to /path/to/functions%func) is
potentially dangerous though because if you have that in your
$PATH, you're vulnerable to attackers planting %builtin
directories (in /tmp for instance) which will be considered by
other things than dash/ash when looking up $PATH.

That's worked around by using /%builtin instead of %builtin
though.

-- 
Stephane