On Sat, Nov 05, 2016 at 10:42:46AM -0500, David Wright wrote: > The current working directory is included here three times???at the > beginning, middle and end. > > :/usr/bin::/bin:.
Including the current directory in one's PATH (either by using "." explicitly, or by using an empty string) is considered a bad practice. It opens you up to certain exploits by malicious users. The classic example is that a malicious user puts a program named "sl" in the /tmp directory, and waits for someone (preferably root) to change directory to /tmp and then mistype "ls" as "sl". This runs the malicious user's program with the other user's privileges. Thus, it's strongly recommended that you do *not* put the current working directory into PATH. If you need to execute a program in the current directory, you can invoke it with a leading ./ ./myscript This bypasses the PATH lookup (because the command name contains a slash character). The leading "." is simply a directory name, not anything magic to the shell. > One other point. I see you use spaces in your filenames. Regardless of > this, you should quote your strings in such as FILENAME=$F$N$E In a simple assignment like that, you don't need to quote. Word splitting and pathname expansion are not performed, for legacy reasons. However, quoting doesn't hurt. http://mywiki.wooledge.org/Quotes
