Following up on the 2nd reply (++ on that one), I think it's hard to imagine a situation where the content from an email form "has to be passed through various Linux system calls." Maybe you think it has to, but I suspect you're wrong.

Whatever Linux processes you're talking about, there are bound to be ways to do what you intend to do without exposing untrusted text to a shell command line.

As for what the "risky" characters are, it's likely that all ASCII characters that match [^^/%@+\w-] are able to invoke "non-literal meanings" in a bash command line. Some (like ~ or #) might only do this if they occur in certain positions.

As for any non-ASCII characters that might happen to show up from a web form, well, who knows... I'd rather not have to experiment with that.

---

---

• Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
• Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:

  <code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>

• Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
• Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.