Mailing List Archive

Re: Completely turning off /etc/passwd deliveries - how?
> ???!!! this seems very complicated.
> what's this fixation some people have with C compilers?
>
> ln -s /bin/true /var/qmail/bin/qmail-getpw

On overly gnu-ish machines (linux systems in particular), older versions
of /bin/true were just shell scripts that returned true. Though that was
supposed to be fine on most cases, I learned to avoid it since it was
potentially breakable.

-Peter
Re: Completely turning off /etc/passwd deliveries - how? [ In reply to ]
> of /bin/true were just shell scripts that returned true. Though that was

umm, how about *current* releases of everything else... solaris 2, aix,
sunos 4... all use a shell based /bin/true, usually with a high
version number :-)
Re: Completely turning off /etc/passwd deliveries - how? [ In reply to ]
On 5 Feb 1997, Mark Eichin wrote:

> > of /bin/true were just shell scripts that returned true. Though that was
> umm, how about *current* releases of everything else... solaris 2, aix,
> sunos 4... all use a shell based /bin/true, usually with a high
> version number :-)

Well, I'd comment, but it's unpublished proprietary source code of at&t,
so I don't want to accidentally quote the important part or anything :)

Anyway, as I recall, the real problem was that since it's a shell script,
it's possible to break out of it on a heavily loaded system if you use it
for a login, so I got out of the habit.

-Peter