From owner-freebsd-arch Fri Dec 14 2:27:54 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Received: from fledge.watson.org (fledge.watson.org [204.156.12.50]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 0A6B537B419; Fri, 14 Dec 2001 02:27:51 -0800 (PST) Received: from fledge.watson.org (robert@fledge.pr.watson.org [192.0.2.3]) by fledge.watson.org (8.11.6/8.11.5) with SMTP id fBEARoi82395; Fri, 14 Dec 2001 05:27:50 -0500 (EST) (envelope-from robert@fledge.watson.org) Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2001 05:27:49 -0500 (EST) From: Robert Watson X-Sender: robert@fledge.watson.org To: Ruslan Ermilov Cc: Greg Lehey , Garance A Drosihn , Peter Wemm , Nik Clayton , Warner Losh , ache@FreeBSD.org, freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: Changing 'man' to check alternate destination for 'cat' pages In-Reply-To: <20011214101857.C35094@sunbay.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Fri, 14 Dec 2001, Ruslan Ermilov wrote: > Just having a CATMAN envariable is not enough, this would break many > things. There are hosts on which people use different locales > simultaneously. Look at how the usr/share/man/en.ISO8859-1 is organized > nowadays, and realize why, while sharing the man? directories with the > .., it has its own cat? directories. Not to mention the security issues -- the one nice thing about the hard-coded catman right now is that it greatly limits the scope for damage from a setuid man. I'm not entirely opposed to the notion of configuring its location in /etc/man.conf or something, but agree that a run-time user-tunable version of the same would be worrying. Even leaving aside the more serious attacks, imagine for a moment what would happen if arbitrary users could tweak the contents of arbitrary .8 man pages :-). > The "cat" feature of man(1) is insecure, and is probably going to be > nuked after a release of 4.5. Great! I've been hoping for that for years. :-) Robert N M Watson FreeBSD Core Team, TrustedBSD Project robert@fledge.watson.org NAI Labs, Safeport Network Services To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message