mounting filesystems with "noexec"

[randall s. ehren]

> With all that has been said so far, what is the actual point of
> the noexec flag? 

it prevents executables from being executed on a specific partition.

for instance, you can mount /var with the noexec flag and if you then 
try to run any binaries (executables) from /var they simply will not 
execute.

root at server[~]% grep 'noexec' /etc/fstab
/dev/aacd0s1h  /var  ufs  rw,noexec,nosuid   2       2
root at server[~]% cp /usr/bin/top /var/top
root at server[~]% /var/./top
/var/./top: Permission denied.

  -randall

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