Perl 5.8.7
Does the script you're testing with have the suid bit set? I don't think it's stricly a taint problem. Initially I also thought it was an issue with passing tainted input so I put debug warnings in rmtree(). The first path value (passed in from the application) was taint free through the first chdir call. The subsequent recursive calls to sub directories as found and sanitized by File::Path then died.

I noticed that File::Find also had issues like this and they've added an untaint flag to the interface. The File::Find code swaps between two variables (which File::Path doesn't) when untainting and doesn't appear to suffer from the bug as a result

In reply to Re^2: inconsistency in untaint by ruzam
in thread inconsistency in untaint by ruzam

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":



  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.