As I understand it, taint mode prevents user input ('tainted data') from finding its way to the underlying OS where it might be used to compromise security.

This is meaningful in a web application, where you want to protect your servers from web monkeys trying to poke and prod their way through your application to the OS.

It's not so meaningful in (for example) an installation script, where you want to be able to specify an installation directory (as I did earlier today) and have the script write stuff into that directory.

From an efficiency point of view, I imagine that taint causes Perl to perform more checks, thus it may run more slowly. That's a waste of cycles if such checks aren't required.

Alex / talexb / Toronto

"Groklaw is the open-source mentality applied to legal research" ~ Linus Torvalds

In reply to Re: Taint mode... use all the time? by talexb
in thread Taint mode... use all the time? by jfroebe

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