On Fri, Dec 06, 2019 at 12:06:10PM -0500, songbird wrote: > #this doesn't work... > old_summary=`echo "Previous glitches and inconsistencies were due to a > missing / at the end of the baseurl... ,.#*$+%*$&#+(*={_})"` > result=`echo "summary: \"\"" | sed -e "s/^summary: .*$/summary: > \"${old_summary}\"/"`
Code injection. > my question is about why i need to pre-process the summary to escape the > slash? i use other characters in the summaries without issues just that > slash causes problems... ????? Ideally, you'd just stop trying to use sed with user-supplied variables injected into the code. Sed was never built to be safe for that kind of work. There are some alternatives at <https://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ/021> including one using perl which handles arbitrary user-supplied search and replace variables safely.