Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!auspex!guy From: guy@auspex.UUCP (Guy Harris) Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards Subject: Re: rm etc. (was: Nasty Security Hole?) Message-ID: <553@auspex.UUCP> Date: 1 Dec 88 07:57:24 GMT References: <175@ernie.NECAM.COM> <189@wyn386.UUCP> <8910@smoke.BRL.MIL> <118@hudson.Morgan.COM> <8941@smoke.BRL.MIL> <480@auspex.UUCP> <8956@smoke.BRL.MIL> <730@quintus.UUCP> <13193@ncoast.UUCP> <783@quintus.UUCP> Reply-To: guy@auspex.UUCP (Guy Harris) Distribution: na Organization: Auspex Systems, Santa Clara Lines: 28 >There is more reason to doubt UUNET: Hell, I tried it a few hours ago on "uunet", and it worked the way Richard said it did on a Sequent. The "rm: remove foo?" prompt looks suspiciously like a "rm -i" prompt; perhaps on the systems where it was seen, "rm" was a script, shell function (or, if "ksh", alias) for "rm -i"? >Internationalisation will be a great opportunity to tidy this up. Yup, it'll get put into a file, probably; with any luck, users will be able to generate their own files, so you can get rm: overrideway rotectionpay 644 orfay /etc/passwd? On a more serious note, putting messages into files may have other advantages, such as 1) having people other than programmers write them (even if we write our native languages well, we may not know the best way to express what the message is trying to say) and 2) providing a nice database or databases listing all system messages, so you can consider listing them along with explanations for the perplexed, if the creator of the message in 1) can't make them self-explanatory.