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by mbrumlow 661 days ago
> highlighting a problem exists

Coding bugs into your programs is not a problem it’s a bug. None of the weird arg[0] examples can happen on the shell (without escaping), only when using system calls.

The more I read the article the more I feel this is a reaction to a behavior the author did not expect and fancy them as smart therefore the last 20 years of use age of this feature are obviously wrong.
1 comments
cesarb 660 days ago
> None of the weird arg[0] examples can happen on the shell (without escaping), only when using system calls.

  $ help exec
  [...]
  Options:
    -a name pass NAME as the zeroth argument to COMMAND
Even in shell, you can explicitly specify the argv[0] when running an executable.
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mbrumlow 660 days ago
Not in all shells, but in some exec is a pass through to the system call …

Bash is a language, so again we are telling the stream to do something silly and calling it out had a security problem.

The issue is not arg[0] but uninformed expectations on how these systems work.

Relying on the program/command name for security and not the executable path is a bug.

Furthermore if a bad actor has enough access to run exec you probably are in a bad way.

The whole post also seems to not understand that both windows and linux have ways to change this display after the executable is running via SetConseTitle and prctl or simply modify arg[0] directly.

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