Security wise; I would never set paths from the environment because it opens an entire other box of security problems. You will have to doublecheck your code which parameters to accept/deny even more than before because your path will be chosen automatically by your program which can give quite strange results if the parameters given by the end-user are malicious ...

You could alternatively pre-define a few paths in an array or if you are -really- sure your paths won't be exploited in one or another way (to parse files which should not parsed like /etc/passwd etc..); by setting only the paths that are deemed neccesary for your program to run.

Still I think you better do this with a very small piece of (init) code instead of doing this automatically because then you know for sure which you have control over; while if-automatically you will loose that fine grain of control if you forget that one check.

Another way is chroot or a "sandbox"; where you check first if the path is part of the "sandbox" and if so; get the template, if not; deny. Like /home/users/templates/wildchild and /home/users/templates/midlifexs could have as root /home/users/templates ; this would limit any security hell to that one path /home/users/templates and not /home/users/* or others (if coded appropriate) ...

In reply to Re: HTML::Template - HTML_TEMPLATE_ROOT - multiple paths? by freakingwildchild
in thread HTML::Template - HTML_TEMPLATE_ROOT - multiple paths? by MidLifeXis

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.