Beware xargs security holes

[2656-Daniel R. Levy00000000000]

>>But it's still susceptible to filenames with carriage returns, and will
>>be until find has a -print0 option. Please, please, please don't claim
>>that your xargs is by any means secure when a standard command like
>>
>>  find / -name '#*' -atime +7 -print | xargs rm
>>
>>lets a malicious user remove every file on the system. Maybe it's
>>unreasonable of me to want others to live up to my standard of security,
>>but in my eyes no \n-parsing xargs qualifies as ``a good job.'' Sorry.

For a brief moment there I thought one could do an end run by telling
find not to match files whose names contain newline (e.g. ! -name '*^J*'
where ^J is an actual newline character).  But alas, that does not exclude
files within directories whose names (the directories' that is) contain
newlines.  Oh well.
-- 
* Daniel R. Levy *  uunet!tellab5!mtcchi!levy *                        |
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