Re: getopts security problem

[Paul Eggert]

Nico Schottelius <address@hidden> writes:

> What I am asking you: Why does chown accept arguments, which are
> not at the beginning? Is that a glibc "bug" or "feature"?

It's a feature.  To avoid the problem, prepend "./" to "*", e.g.,
"chown nico.nico ./*".

You'll run into similar problems with commands like "cat *" and
"rm *".  Prepending "./" fixes the problem there too, e.g., "cat ./*",
"rm ./*".

> I know it from some other Unices, that only parameters allowed
> at first, not after arguments.

All Unixes have this problem to some extent.  For example "cat *" will
mishandle a file whose name is the single character "-".  Prepending
"./" solves this problem on all Unixes.