5 ms·
"The less(1) we're all familiar with has been completely rewritten. After importing a fork from illumos' Garrett D'Amore, OpenBSD continued to make improvements
by robinhoodexe 11y ago
"The less(1) we're all familiar with has been completely rewritten. After importing a fork from illumos' Garrett D'Amore, OpenBSD continued to make improvements to the code. A safer and more modern tool was the end result, even if it's just for viewing text. Hopefully there will be less bugs now."
Impressive work.
- cajetanus 11y agoAnd less bugs. Beautiful pun there.
- duaneb 11y ago...until you realize that the proper word would be "fewer" because bugs are countable.
- stsp 11y agoBut there's an infinite number of bugs!
- dsr_ 11y agoHopefully fewer less bugs.
- phaemon 11y ago...or until you realise that the personal preferences of Robert Baker do not constitute what is "proper". It was a daft preference when expressed and it's no less a daft "rule" now.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- chipaca 11y agoI think you meant ”fewer daft”.
- vacri 11y agoWordplay humour is not built for pedants.
- gosukiwi 11y agoenglish grammar strikes again
- silverforgotapw 11y agoYou found a bug!
- omginternets 11y agoLess was unsafe? How so?
- slrz 11y agoProbably by emitting control sequences from the input files unfiltered to your terminal. Just guessing, but it's the one big thing that occurs to me when thinking of an unsafe pager.
- omginternets 11y agoAh, okay that makes sense. Thanks!
- Someone 11y agoIt may be much, much worse. http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2014/Nov/74 http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2014/Nov/74: "Many Linux distributions ship with the 'less' command automagically interfaced to 'lesspipe'-type scripts, usually invoked via LESSOPEN. This is certainly the case for CentOS and Ubuntu. Unfortunately, many of these scripts appear to call a rather large number of third-party tools that likely have not been designed with malicious inputs in mind. On CentOS, lesspipe appears to include things such as groff + troff + grotty, man, and cpio. On Ubuntu, there's isoinfo (?!), ar from binutils, and so on. Ancient and obscure compression utilities and doc converters crop up, too." I vaguely remember a ?different? issue where less would load a shared library to list its symbols.