p5pRT
commented
25 years ago From @doughera88
On Wed\, 15 Mar 2000\, M.J.T. Guy wrote:
I notice that a couple of Configure's temporary files are in /tmp/c... while most of them go in the UU directory. Is there a reason for this?
In the context of the current witchhunt\, does this use of /tmp raise any security issues?
I sure hope nobody is running Configure as root :-). Nobody should trust that such a twisty maze of shell scripts is perfectly secure.
On a quick scan\, the first uses of /tmp are not essential at all -- the patch below eliminates them. We could probably safely skip the Xenix csh bug tests too\, but I'm not proposing anything that radical today.
The other use of /tmp at least historically was useful for determining whether a system supported long file names (d_flexfnam) on some file systems but not on others. /tmp was chosen as a file system that was likely to be local\, instead of an NFS mount. I haven't touched that one. If folks are truly concerned\, we can probably just remove the /tmp tests entirely and hope the user is working on a filesystem that is typical of the system as a whole. [I'll send that as a separate optional patch for consideration.] (Actually NT-mounted filesystems are probably more of a real issue nowadays than v7/System III/System V 14-char filename limits.
-- Andy Dougherty doughera@lafayette.edu Dept. of Physics Lafayette College\, Easton PA 18042
Migrated from rt.perl.org#2764 (status was 'resolved')
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