It's no more a security hole than "system" is. Or a kitchen knife a murder weapon. Magic open was there before the fast majority of the current Perl programmers even knew there was such a thing as Perl, and it has been documented that way.

I disagree. system is an explicit call. By analogy, if I were to system(), I would pick up the kitchen knife and know better. With the magic-diamond <>, the knife may magically backstab me without me even realizing what happened ;-) I know now, but how about the uninformed?

I can respect legacy since magic open existed a long time ago. But sometimes legacy needs to change for the sake of security considerations.

But with the addition of a single keystroke, that filter won't execute arbitrary shell commands.

Awww man.. now I've got to taint my simple filters? How is this making it easy and safe for common & simple read-only filter operations, like the one in my previous post?

And IMO, it's always a good idea to enable tainting if you're running in an environment you cannot trust (but then, if you cannot trust the environment, is such a broad shell expansion a good idea in the first place?)

At $WORK, I can trust that my environment is not hostile. But I don't trust that my environment is error-free. So, you can say it's sort of a semi-trust :-) The last thing I need to worry about is how filenames will affect my Perl filters.

---

---

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! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

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:
	&		&
	<		&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.