Re: C set-user-ID program wrapper for Perl script and security

On 2008-08-31, Richard Heathfield <rjh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Peter Michaux said:

On Aug 30, 3:03 pm, "Malcolm McLean" <regniz...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

it is reasonable to hardcode paths in a Perl script,
much less sensible to do so in a C program.

Why is that?

No reason whatsoever. Malcolm is wrong. If you want to hardcode paths in a
C program, go to it. There will be an impact on portability (because the
path might not have the same semantics or might not even exist on another
machine), but that argument applies just as much to the Perl script.


Not really - a C program is almost always compiled, which means to change
a hardcoded path one needs to have access to the source code. By nature,
a Perl script is itself the source, meaning that any hardcoded paths are
going to be human-readable and mutable.

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Andrew Poelstra apoelstra@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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