From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from euclid.skiles.gatech.edu (list@euclid.skiles.gatech.edu [130.207.146.50]) by melb.werple.net.au (8.7.5/8.7.3) with ESMTP id MAA06386 for ; Tue, 7 May 1996 12:44:45 +1000 (EST) Received: (from list@localhost) by euclid.skiles.gatech.edu (8.7.3/8.7.3) id WAA04741; Mon, 6 May 1996 22:30:18 -0400 (EDT) Resent-Date: Mon, 6 May 1996 22:28:11 -0400 (EDT) From: Zoltan Hidvegi Message-Id: <199605070216.EAA00391@hzoli.ppp.cs.elte.hu> Subject: Re: need help establishing safety of zsh to sysadmin To: unpingco@mpl.UCSD.EDU (Jose Unpingco) Date: Tue, 7 May 1996 04:16:04 +0200 (MET DST) Cc: zsh-users@math.gatech.edu In-Reply-To: <9605062038.AA16823@cryptica.UCSD.EDU> from Jose Unpingco at "May 6, 96 01:38:11 pm" X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4ME+ PL11 (25)] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Resent-Message-ID: <"J3FF.0.a91.wKhZn"@euclid> Resent-From: zsh-users@math.gatech.edu X-Mailing-List: archive/latest/205 X-Loop: zsh-users@math.gatech.edu X-Loop: zsh-workers@math.gatech.edu Precedence: list Resent-Sender: zsh-workers-request@math.gatech.edu > I'm hesistant to give up zsh and all its great functions, which I've > come to depend upon, so I was hoping some of you could give me some > specific examples of how zsh has not caused problems for you sysadmins > out here. We use zsh on 7 different platfors here. Users can use either zsh or tcsh as their login shell. I use zsh as a root shell on all Linux machines. I use zsh in system scripts (like /usr/lib/X11/xdm/Xsession which starts with #!/usr/local/bin/zsh here) in and cgi-bin scripts. As zsh is the same on all the seven systems it is very good for writing scripts that would run on all platforms. I really do not understand what are the security problems that zsh may cause. I think that zsh is az safe as any other shell. If the sysop thinks that someone wants to run a suid zsh he can put a line [[ -o privileged ]] && exit to /etc/zshenv and something similar to /etc/suid_profile to prevent this (but it is quite useless as the security is already compromised if one manages to create a working suid shell). And it is not an argument that `zsh is not supported'. A normal Unix system usually have thousans of utilities and I doubt that all of them are `supported' but these are still there for everyone to use. Zoltan