On Wed, 11 Mar 2015 at 17:58, Paul Eggert wrote: > On my Ubuntu 14.10 system, fgrep lives in /bin and is a separate executable > (actually a shell script), but it invokes 'grep'. Likewise for Fedora 21, > where fgrep lives in /usr/bin. So what you write doesn't necessarily > contradict what I said.
While it invokes "grep", it does not seem to invoke my $HOME/bin/grep, thus it will not honor the grep options set in $HOME/bin/grep. > On the other hand, now that I've tested it, I see that when I type 'fgrep' > Bash invokes it as '/bin/fgrep', which surprises me and which defeats the > purpose of having 'fgrep' look at $0. I installed the attached patch, which > should fix that. I hope that make is clear now why a helper script gets increasingly more complex if not complicated than a single environment variable. >> Why is GREP_OPTIONS random and LESS or ZIPOPT or GZIP are not? > > For starters, none of the other variables are used by standard utilities. I'd consider gzip, zip, or less pretty "standard". I'd cite more standard utilities, but I don't want to put out any more ideas here... > Admittedly some judgment is needed here. As LESS is merely a user-interface > thing it's less worrisome. I don't know what ZIPOPT is. >From zip(1): > The environment variable ZIPOPT can be used to change the default > options. So, pretty much what GREP_OPTIONS is^Wused to be. > GZIP is worrisome and probably should go -- an attacker can use GZIP to > cause 'gzip' to remove /etc/passwd, for example. So it looks like I An "attacker" can set $PATH to /tmp and do stuff too. If an attacker can modify a user's environment, all is lost anyway. > should add removing GZIP to my list of things to do too.... I was afraid you'd say something like this :-\ Christian. -- BOFH excuse #277: Your Flux Capacitor has gone bad.
