Bug 25405
| Summary: | misleading warning from catman(1), etc. | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Product: | Documentation | Reporter: | rdm <rdm> |
| Component: | Books & Articles | Assignee: | freebsd-bugs (Nobody) <bugs> |
| Status: | Closed FIXED | ||
| Severity: | Affects Only Me | ||
| Priority: | Normal | ||
| Version: | Latest | ||
| Hardware: | Any | ||
| OS: | Any | ||
Rich Morin wrote: > Don't start this program as root, use: > echo /usr/bin/catman | nice -5 su -m man > > appears. There are really several problems here: > > 1) The program should check whether catman is actually > being run by root before issuing the warning. > > 2) If an error has occurred, the program should exit, > rather then going on to write root-owned files in > /usr/share/man/cat* (or wherever...). > > 3) The program should be clever enough to _do_ the > necessary work, rather than telling the user how to > do it. Basically, the programmer has gratuitously > broken the method of operation for a command. > > 4) The programmer's instructions to the user make use > of an undocumented feature of man(1). What, exactly, > is going on when we pipe this text string into man? RTFM... That's not what you're doing, you're passing the text string into 'su', which simply runs a shell as user 'man' which then executes the command /usr/bin/catman as that user. That's not to say the other points aren't valid, but I'm a bit busy at the moment, sorry. :-( Hopefully someone else can deal with it. -- Ben Smithurst / csxbcs@comp.leeds.ac.uk / ben@FreeBSD.org Responsible Changed From-To: freebsd-doc->wosch Over to the catman(1) maintainer to decide whether it should bail out if run under root. State Changed From-To: open->closed The remnants of this PR have been fixed by the C rewrite. Responsible Changed From-To: wosch->freebsd-bugs |
If catman(1) is run as root, the message: Don't start this program as root, use: echo /usr/bin/catman | nice -5 su -m man appears. There are really several problems here: 1) The program should check whether catman is actually being run by root before issuing the warning. 2) If an error has occurred, the program should exit, rather then going on to write root-owned files in /usr/share/man/cat* (or wherever...). 3) The program should be clever enough to _do_ the necessary work, rather than telling the user how to do it. Basically, the programmer has gratuitously broken the method of operation for a command. 4) The programmer's instructions to the user make use of an undocumented feature of man(1). What, exactly, is going on when we pipe this text string into man? In passing, I will note that the warning messages emitted by this command string: Unknown FreeBSD version ``),'' at line 320 Unknown BSD version ``'' at line 5 Unknown BSD version ``'' at line 5 are essentially useless, as the user has no way of knowing which man page is being discussed. Fix: Recode catman, as described above. How-To-Repeat: % su # catman