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bug#17618: ls -l dangerous when listing links


From: Michał Adamczyk
Subject: bug#17618: ls -l dangerous when listing links
Date: Wed, 28 May 2014 15:36:09 +0200
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/24.5.0

Call it a bug or call it a feature. It is dangerous though.

When using `ls -l` to list a directory with links in it, it will produce an output similar to this:

lrwxrwxrwx 1 user group 30 1980-01-01 00:01 link_name -> /path/to/destination/file

Pretty cool, huh?
However, if you select this line and accidentally hit right mouse button, it'll get copied to your prompt. And if you select more than one line, it'll get copied with \n which will get interpreted as if you pushed the Enter.

So the whole line gets interpreted as a command:
lrwxrwxrwx [no such command] 1 user group 30 1980-01-01 00:01 link_name - [parameters for non-existing command] > /path/to/destination/file [redirect output to that file]

Since the output is empty, you'll get the target of that link overwritten with an empty file.

My suggestion is to change the representation symbols of link to something that won't get interpreted.


Cheers,

Mike





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