use Perl

• Dropping privileges in Perl (Score:1)

  by pjf (2464)

  The advisory itself is rather vague and unhelpful. I'm surprised it exists at all. However it does provide an excellent opportunity to talk about Unix privileges and Perl. Randal, I hope you don't mind me using your journal too much for this purpose. ;)

  Dropping privileges in Perl is notoriously hard, and stems primarily from the fact that most unix systems provide at least three flavours of uid (real, effective, and saved), whereas Perl provides only two (real and effective). The saved uid, the one
  • Re:Dropping privileges in Perl (Score:1)

    by jmason (3282)

    Perl on MacOS (and possibly other BSDish platforms) *does* indeed have some unportable wierdness regarding uid/euid handing, as we found in this SpamAssassin bug report [apache.org].

    It appeared that some perl versions required RUID==EUID==0 before $ = 100; $" would silently fail to drop RUID==0 privs, and instead leave it at 0. To quote the bug report:

    Interestingly, the same exact issue occurs on my Mac OS X machine,
    but not any of the other platforms I have access to...
    
    root# perl -e 'sub p {print "RUID: $<,
    • Re:Dropping privileges in Perl (Score:1)

      by jmason (3282) on 2006.01.04 17:25 (#45511) Homepage

      'It appeared that some perl versions required RUID==EUID==0 before $ = 100; $" would silently fail to drop RUID==0 privs, and instead leave it at 0.'
      
      well, that made no sense. sorry; forgot to escape $< and $>. anyway, read the pasted code; it's all pretty clear there.

      Reply to This

      Parent