A request to segregate man pages for shell built-ins

[Polytropon]

On Thu, 26 Oct 2017 19:24:50 -0400, Lowell Gilbert wrote:
> Polytropon <freebsd at edvax.de> writes:
> 
> > Yes, this is true as long as the script uses [ or test. Some do
> > explicitely call /bin/test. I'm almost sure this isn't true anymore
> > on today's modern FreeBSD, but older UNIX scripts occassionally
> > were constructed in such a way that they called the binaries
> > explicitely with the full path. Maybe this has been some portability
> > issue.
> 
> It's more of a security issue. If you call it with the full path,
> you know, absolutely, which flavor of the command will be used.

Or a specific environment issue, where $PATH couldn't be predicted,
so an explicit call was needed (e. g., /usr/local/bin/lpr vs.
/usr/bin/lpr). Of course security is added, for example when
there is a "fake binary" placed in a directory like ~/bin which
is listed in $PATH _before_ the system directory, and such a
"fake binary" mimics a command often used, like cp, rm, grep,
and what you usually find in scripts, and does something that
might be problematic - unnoticed...


-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...