[nylug-talk] Cute bash feature (redirect-network)

[Ron Guerin]

Yusuke Shinyama wrote:
> On Thu, 14 Jun 2007 12:48:21 -0500, Michael Bacarella <mbac at netgraft.com> wrote:
>>> Can you elaborate on that "functionless crap?"
>>> I'm just curious.
>> Since function is the enemy of security, all I had to do was think of
>> the most functionless UNIXy OS that came to mind...
> 
> I'd rather say it's the complexity that is the enemy of security.
> At least for this particular feature, it could be separated and
> controlled independently without losing much convenience. Of
> course it's always difficult to find a good way of separation or
> decomposition of functions (and this sort of problems can be often
> political rather than technical.)  But blindly fusing many
> functions into one big opaque binary seems very Microsoft-ish (or
> Emacs-ish?), which makes me afraid of potential bugs/security
> flaws.

As I saw written somewhere, Bash seems to have totally given up on the
idea about small being beautiful.  I suppose you have to draw the line
somewhere, but thing that drives me a little crazy is that whether you
use the new features or not, unless (as in this case) your distro has
disabled them, you're still paying the price for them being there and
you might as well use them.

- Ron