which is one of the reasons that Perl's taint mode requires you to set your own $ENV{PATH}

This is the crux, I think. sverrill should absolutely be using taint mode for such a CGI script in the first place. This means (as haukex rightly says) that $ENV{PATH} should be explicitly set inside the script. Combining that with the one-server nature of this deployment means that I would suggest putting all your executable programs for the script to use in one directory which you specifically create for this purpose. Setting $ENV{PATH} to be just this directory then further limits the damage which could potentially be done.

Never underestimate the chance that some miscreant could send a specially crafted request and break your script in a system-harming way. Try also to avoid the hubris which tells you that your script lacks such vulnerabilities.

In summary:

Not a panacea, but solid, sensible precaution. Good luck.

In reply to Re^3: cgi/perl/fortran web program by hippo
in thread cgi/perl/fortran web program by sverrill

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