perlmeditation
gellyfish
<p>
There always seems to be a background of chatter about how Perl makes it easy to create bad programs, and quite honestly I've never really dissented from that view: there is a lot of horrible, insecure and badly written code out there.
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However inspired by [http://www.cipher.org.uk/index.php?p=projects/bugle.project|Bugle] I thought it might be interesting to see just how much bad stuff there really is. Of course there is always the "[http://www.google.co.uk/search?sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B2GGGL_enGB175&q=%22un-webify%22+filetype%3Apl|low hanging fruit]" of code using horrid cut and pasted parameter parsing which always contain so many other <strike>lovely</strike> bugs. Then I turned to [http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=%22print+MAIL+%27From%3A+%27%22+filetype%3Apl|passing unchecked form input as a header to a mail program]. Eugh. [http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=%22system%28%24ARGV%22+filetype%3Apl| Passing unchecked input to <code>system</code>] anyone? Anyway I wanted to try something like <code>"open OUT ">$In"" filetype:pl</code> to try for unchecked input being passed to <code>open</code> but it made too many [http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=%22open+OUT+%22%3E%24In%22%22+filetype%3Apl|false positives]
</p>
<p>Anyway I got bored at that point, however I thought it would be amusing to set you lot on it to see if we could come up with some examples of searches that are guaranteed to throw up the most egregious Perl code on the web.</p>
<p>To it!</p>
<p>/J\</p>