Wanted: thoughts about history mechanisms.

[Michael Meissner]

In article <1991May05.003216.300 at am.sublink.org> alex at am.sublink.org
(Alex Martelli) writes:

| 'easily'?  ALL dot files in your home directory can be thought of as
| "security holes" in this way - if you leave them writable (in general,
| if you leave your home directory writable!), you're already asking
| for big trouble, and, no, I don't think such mode-600ness is enforced
| today for .profile, .exrc, .cshrc, .login, .rhosts, whatever $ENV
| points at in ksh, and so on!

Of the files listed, only .rhosts should (and in fact must) be
protected by 0600.  I see no point in making the rest world
unreadable.  It helps newbies if I can point them to existing dot
files for examples of how to customize things (though of course my
personel dot files have been overcustomized over the years, and tend
to overwhelm).
--
Michael Meissner	email: meissner at osf.org		phone: 617-621-8861
Open Software Foundation, 11 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA, 02142

Considering the flames and intolerance, shouldn't USENET be spelled ABUSENET?