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Top Forums UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers Why Do You Need the Explicit Pathname to Execute? Post 302737819 by sudon't on Thursday 29th of November 2012 07:34:36 PM
Old 11-29-2012
Quote:
Originally Posted by sudon't
Ok, I kinda get that it might be about having executables in permissions protected directories, but if all you need to do is use the absolute pathname, it doesn't seem like much security.
Quote:
In fact this makes for an awful lot of security
I should have been a bit more specific. What I meant here, we were speaking of an executable that would be sitting somewhere outside of my PATH, in my working directory, needing the explicit pathname to execute. I was wondering why I have to type that dot-slash to execute something in my working directory, when it's not needed to give the same file as an argument to a command.
The thing that surprises me, is that bash says "command not found," when it had no trouble finding the file only a moment before.
If I may borrow from your example, someone who gained access to my account might look around and see the little innocuous scripts I'm writing, replace one of them with your malicious script, giving it the same name as one of mine. There's nothing stopping me from executing it, except typing dot-slash.
In that sense, I don't see how having to type the explicit path for executables in my working directory, (dot-slash), gives anymore real security than not having to. Is there a reason one has to do that to execute a file?

Quote:
An even better idea would be to: make /usr/local/bin writable only by root.
It looks like it's already set up like that. Well, wheel can write. That's root and admin, right? I know I have to authenticate to write to it.
Code:
$ ls -l /usr/local |grep [^s]bin
drwxrwxr-x  50 root  wheel  1700 Nov 17 16:08 bin

 

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GZEXE(1)						      General Commands Manual							  GZEXE(1)

NAME
gzexe - compress executable files in place SYNOPSIS
gzexe name ... DESCRIPTION
The gzexe utility allows you to compress executables in place and have them automatically uncompress and execute when you run them (at a penalty in performance). For example if you execute ``gzexe /usr/bin/gdb'' it will create the following two files: -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1026675 Jun 7 13:53 /usr/bin/gdb -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2304524 May 30 13:02 /usr/bin/gdb~ /usr/bin/gdb~ is the original file and /usr/bin/gdb is the self-uncompressing executable file. You can remove /usr/bin/gdb~ once you are sure that /usr/bin/gdb works properly. This utility is most useful on systems with very small disks. OPTIONS
-d Decompress the given executables instead of compressing them. SEE ALSO
gzip(1), znew(1), zmore(1), zcmp(1), zforce(1) CAVEATS
The compressed executable is a shell script. This may create some security holes. In particular, the compressed executable relies on the PATH environment variable to find gzip and some standard utilities (basename, chmod, ln, mkdir, mktemp, rm, sleep, and tail). BUGS
gzexe attempts to retain the original file attributes on the compressed executable, but you may have to fix them manually in some cases, using chmod or chown. GZEXE(1)
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