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Not as far as I know, but I have heard about people pasting the Wrong Thing into a root shell. In a way it's a casting error. A type safety violation. You past

by Arnt 7y ago

Not as far as I know, but I have heard about people pasting the Wrong Thing into a root shell. In a way it's a casting error. A type safety violation. You paste text into a privileged shell and coerce it to be sh, and when it goes wrong the sh input is rich in < and > characters. Friends of mine have mentioned at least a) people accidentally pasting much more than the intended line into sh because they selected more than intended and b) sites that modify the cut buffer silently to add some "pasted from … blah … like us on facebook" or somesuch, I forget the details. The person who wrote the page intended one line to be castable to sh, another person who worked on the site added the script that transformed the cut/paste without realising that.

m0xte 7y ago
Yes. I had a pretty bad one from a commercial software company. Running any script someone else wrote badly intentionally or otherwise is dangerous. The source is moot. Rather than provide distribution packages they had a shell script that installed and updated their stuff. If you ran the update script it would evaluate rm -rf $(SOFTWARE_ROOT)/ That environment variable was not set if the software hadn’t been installed and it wouldn’t run unless it was a root shell. Guess who ran the update script instead of the install script and hosed the machine? I gave them a whole lifetime of bile over that. The product turned out to be horrible as well.
aasasd 7y ago
Funny thing, I've pasted wrong text into the terminal on multiple occasions—from having copypasted some paragraphs of text and immediately forgetting about that. Each time I expect my files to be botched, but the worst that's happened so far is some unwanted files appearing due to ‘>’ being there in the text.
wibble10 7y ago
Once I worked at a place where ooh support accidentally pasted an entire maint guide into putty (right click paste is not a good idea) on a prod oracle server, it was fine until the lines in the doc which read: Dbfile1 -> /path/to/dbfile1 ... Etc Which needless to say hosed the entire box... over Christmas... And this is why they don’t use putty anymore ;)

by Arnt 7y ago

m0xte 7y ago

Yes. I had a pretty bad one from a commercial software company. Running any script someone else wrote badly intentionally or otherwise is dangerous. The source is moot. Rather than provide distribution packages they had a shell script that installed and updated their stuff. If you ran the update script it would evaluate rm -rf $(SOFTWARE_ROOT)/ That environment variable was not set if the software hadn’t been installed and it wouldn’t run unless it was a root shell. Guess who ran the update script instead of the install script and hosed the machine? I gave them a whole lifetime of bile over that. The product turned out to be horrible as well.

aasasd 7y ago

Funny thing, I've pasted wrong text into the terminal on multiple occasions—from having copypasted some paragraphs of text and immediately forgetting about that. Each time I expect my files to be botched, but the worst that's happened so far is some unwanted files appearing due to ‘>’ being there in the text.

wibble10 7y ago

Once I worked at a place where ooh support accidentally pasted an entire maint guide into putty (right click paste is not a good idea) on a prod oracle server, it was fine until the lines in the doc which read: Dbfile1 -> /path/to/dbfile1 ... Etc Which needless to say hosed the entire box... over Christmas... And this is why they don’t use putty anymore ;)