[9fans] What's up with $home? And a security question.

[Stuart Morrow <morrow.stuart@googlemail.com>]

I'd like to dedicate this email to all the programs that don't know
how to expand environment variables.

See*, $path is no longer in the environment (more or less): it's a
union of all the relevant executables at a known place: /bin.

What's a good reason for your home to be in the environment instead of
the namespace?  I can see no problem with letting "me" (say) be a
reserved name so that "/usr/me" can be assumed to always point to the
home you want.  ""'s denote literal values here by the way.  I'm
talking about /usr/me being a bind to /usr/stuart.

You'd lose your home after certain types of rforks but then the same
is true for a home in the environment.

* - that's my trick for avoiding having to put a capital letter in a
command- or other case sensitive token-name just because it's at the
start of a sentence.  That pisses me off in computer documentation so
much.

My other question is: what's the security implications of cpu?  You
get to do processes on the remote box, but then they also get to have
filesystem access on yours.  Does this not worry anyone?  Security is
really the hard thing for me to understand in Plan 9.

Stuart