[throwawayboise]

But perl was already the "standard" for other system/config utilities, no?

[chasil]

I don't know what we mean by "standard," but I found a number of perl references with the following shell fragment:

    $ for x in $(echo $PATH|sed 's/:/ /g'); do file $x/*|grep perl;done

All but two hits were in /usr/sbin, and /usr/bin. I isolated those files with:

    $ file /usr/sbin/* | awk '/perl/{sub(/:.*/,"");sub(/^.*[/]/,"");printf "%s, ", $0}';echo ''

The sbin results are:

    adduser, fw_update, pkg_add, pkg_check, pkg_create, pkg_delete, pkg_info, pkg_mklocatedb, pkg_sign, rmuser, 

There are more in /bin:

    $ file /usr/bin/* | awk '/perl/{sub(/:.*/,"");sub(/^.*[/]/,"");printf "%s, ", $0}';echo ''

    c2ph, corelist, cpan, enc2xs, encguess, h2ph, h2xs, instmodsh, libnetcfg, libtool, perl, perlbug, perldoc, perlivp, piconv, pkg-config, pl2pm, pod2html, pod2man, pod2text, pod2usage, podchecker, podselect, prove, pstruct, skeyprune, splain, streamzip, xsubpp, 

A perl script can't pledge() or unveil(), so I am guessing that anything sensitive has moved to C.

[boogies]

> A perl script can't pledge() or unveil()

It doesn't seem to support all of OpenBSD's privilege separation, but there are OpenBSD::Unveil(3p), OpenBSD::Pledge(3p), and https://github.com/rfarr/Unix-Pledge

https://bronevichok.ru/posts/pledge.html

[chasil]

Did not know that, thanks.