Need help with mh *and* mail on RISC/Ultrix 4.1
Michael Paddon
mwp at ubeaut.enet.dec.com
Mon May 20 11:07:35 AEST 1991
>From article <8370 at jhunix.HCF.JHU.EDU>, by barrett at jhunix.HCF.JHU.EDU (Dan Barrett):
>>Whenever I try to perform a shell escape under vi as
>>called from the "comp" command, it fails with the message
>> "csh: Permission denied"
>
> I have seen this behavior in several of our editors (JOVE, vi) when
> "comp" was not involved, so I do not believe that it is an MH problem.
>
> The problem disappeared completely when I made /bin/sh my editor's
> default shell. I believe that there is a bug in csh that causes this
> problem.
No. The problem is that the relevant MH commands are setgid to kmem
(presumably so they can look at /dev/kmem, god only knows why). It is
a feature of csh that it will barf if you try and run it with set[gu]id
without using the -b flag. This stops a well known security hole.
The fix is to either trash the setgid bits, or even better, get the latest
release of MH and use that instead.
Michael
Disclaimer: My views may or may not be those of my employer.
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