I notice that a few people have mentioned that untrusted programs should be run as another user such as "nobody". This neglects the fact that many people don't have the ability to do this, unless they happen to be UNIX or Linux sysadmins. I'll admit that I am one, but most of the Perl programmers I know at work are not.

Besides, are you sure that there isn't any area on your hard drive that the user "nobody" has write access to? If your server has a lot of users, you can bet that they are making some of their files world-writable. My users do, quite often.

The bottom line is that a program from an untrusted source (or a trusted source that has been hacked) has a potential for danger on most servers. So beware...

buckaduck