In this node, I provided a patch for shellwords.pl. It seems that this program was silently untainting data. I submitted the patch to P5P, but in researching further, I discovered that Text::ParseWords had the same potential security hole. Further, it turns out that the CPAN.pm module uses this module. I attempted to contact the maintainer of Text::ParseWords with a patch, but it appears that pomeranz@netcom.com has disappeared into the aether. This is a core module, but I'm not sure that I should submit the patch to P5P.

What's the protocol for submitting a patch for a module that's not maintained? This seems a more significant issue since this module is part of the standard distribution. I've been trying to find information about this, but the P5P faq, CPAN, and PAUSE seem to have no information on this.

The patch, by the way:

--- ParseWords.pm.orig  Tue May 21 12:51:06 2002
+++ ParseWords.pm       Tue May 21 12:51:52 2002
@@ -50,6 +50,7 @@
 sub parse_line {
        # We will be testing undef strings
        no warnings;
+       use re 'taint'; # if it's tainted, leave it as such

     my($delimiter, $keep, $line) = @_;
     my($quote, $quoted, $unquoted, $delim, $word, @pieces);

[download]

Cheers,
Ovid

I took the advice of lshatzer and submitted the patch to P5P (and found the author using cjf's recommendation). Jarkko Hietaniemi sent a notification that the patches will be in Perl 5.8.0. I'm in the core now :)

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In reply to Patching an unmaintained module by Ovid

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