Unix Horror story script question


 
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Old 11-24-2008
Question Unix Horror story script question

This text and script is borrowed from the "Unix Horror Stories" document.

It states as follows

"""""Management told us to email a security notice to every user on the our system (at that time, around 3000 users). A certain novice administrator on our system wanted to do it, so I instructed them to extract a list of users from /etc/passwd, write a simple shell loop to do the job, and throw it in the background.
Here's what they wrote (bourne shell)...

for USER in `cat user.list`;
do mail $USER <message.text &
done

Have you ever seen a load average of over 300 ??? """" END

My question is this- What is wrong with the script above? Why did it find a place in the Horror stories? It worked well when I tried it.

Maybe he intended to throw the whole script in the background and not just the Mail part. But even so it works just as well... So?
 
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script(1)							   User Commands							 script(1)

NAME
script - make record of a terminal session SYNOPSIS
script [-a] [filename] DESCRIPTION
The script utility makes a record of everything printed on your screen. The record is written to filename. If no file name is given, the record is saved in the file typescript. See WARNINGS. The script command forks and creates a sub-shell, according to the value of $SHELL, and records the text from this session. The script ends when the forked shell exits or when Control-d is typed. OPTIONS
The following option is supported: -a Appends the session record to filename, rather than overwriting it. NOTES
script places everything that appears on the screen in filename, including prompts. ATTRIBUTES
See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes: +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+ | ATTRIBUTE TYPE | ATTRIBUTE VALUE | +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+ |Availability |SUNWcsu | +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+ |CSI |Enabled | +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+ SEE ALSO
attributes(5) WARNINGS
script can pose a security risk when used in directories that are writable by other users (for example, /tmp), especially when run by a privileged user, that is, root. Be sure that typescript is not a link before running script. SunOS 5.10 30 Jan 2004 script(1)