Re: RFC: Illegal Characters in File Names

[Paul Stewart <stewart@parc.com>]

On 2004.07.20 14:49, Guy wrote:
> What about:
> ls|more

Hm.. I've tried this under rxvt, xterm and gnome-terminal and none of  
these respond to the "ls | cat", "ls" or "ls | more" scenarios in any  
unexpected way.  I think we're straying from the point.  If the  
argument is "the filesystem should change because some terminal  
applications might be coerced into responding in vulnerable ways", the  
answer is that the terminal application should be changed.

This is not just about philosophical purity or laziness about who  
should "protect the user".  There are various vectors for getting at  
the output to the terminal.  "ls | cat" is only one of them.  I could  
imagine mail content, and even file content being vulnerable.  If you  
saw a file in /tmp/ named "README_GUY", wouldn't you be the least bit  
tempted to have a look at what was inside?  If we're going to follow  
this branch of the argument, we've got to correctly determine the  
threat to terminals and consider changes to the terminal to truly have  
a story about preventing them.  Alas, this discussion is out of scope  
for fs-devel.

--
Paul