[Adduser-devel] Ditch full paths in favor of locally set PATH?

[Marc Haber]

On Sat, Apr 29, 2006 at 12:32:13PM +0100, Stephen Gran wrote:
> This one time, at band camp, Stephen Gran said:
> > This one time, at band camp, Marc Haber said:
> > > Hi,
> > > 
> > > in reply to #357978, I intend to drop the explicitly listed paths from
> > > the adduser code. Instead, ENV{"PATH"} will be reset to
> > > /sbin:/usr/sbin:/usr/local/sbin to allow local diversions while still
> > > preferring the system binaries.
> > > 
> > > Any comments?
> > 
> > I think if the sysadmin really wants to override one of the important
> > system utilities, it should be allowed.  Indeed, I do this at one site
> > at work to make passwd talk to LDAP.
> > 
> > This patch looks for the right executable in $PATH, instead of
> > hardcoding, which feels correct to me.
> 
> And has a bunch of brokenness in it.  Let me rework it.  Sorry - I
> really need to get a real test environment going on that laptop.

Yes, testing adduser without an easily rebuiltable chroot setup is a
pain. I'll hold off applying the patch, but tell the bug reporter that
we'll change to honoring $PATH soon.

Thanks for reminding me that we avoid using a shell and would have to
handle the path search ourselves. Didn't think about that.

Greetings
Marc

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