:Back To Basics: Avoiding Recursive Alias Disasters On Linux And Unix
Back To Basics: Avoiding Recursive Alias Disasters On Linux And Unix Aug 14, 2008, 22 :04 UTC (2 Talkback[s]) (4046 reads) (Other stories by Mike Tremell)
"The infinite recursion problem with aliases closely parallels a very simple exploit that can be run in a simple shell script. The ends are the same, and the means are closely related. For instance, if you create a shell script called "ls," with the contents:
#!/bin/sh
ls;sleep 1500000000
"and manage to get that in a user's PATH before the real /bin/ls (or /usr/bin/ls), it'll ratchet up the number of open processes and filehandles very quickly. If let sit, it will take down any machine of any size eventually."
