3 ms·

Genuinely curious, what's so bad about the original code that it adds an attack vector?

• bonkabonka 5y ago
  To guard against malicious filenames I use `find ... -print0 | xargs -r0...` since posix disallows null bytes (and forward slashes) in filenames. The `-r` flag on xargs means it doesn't execute its command if find matches nothing. So filenames can contain valid commands delimited with semi-colons that, if not quoted properly, can be unexpectedly run alongside your intended pipeline (say if you're doing the usual and unsafe "for csv in *.csv; do cat $csv; done"). I wish I could've laid my hands on the excellent HN thread from some years back that opened my eyes to this vector, but I'm hopeful someone else will mention it so I can add it to my bash notes file. :P