Re: [PLUG] unix cp function call (thanks)

[Sean Finney <seanius@seanius.net>]

On Sun, Jun 16, 2002 at 12:12:51PM -0400, Walt Mankowski wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 15, 2002 at 02:00:05PM -0400, Fred K Ollinger wrote:
> > The user does supply one of the strings, but I'm not going to do a system
> > b/c I don't know how to get that to work easily w/ a pointer to a char
> > array.
> 
> system(3) only takes one parameter -- a pointer to a character array.
> What's the problem?

I imagine that the string he gets from the user is the filename of the
source or destination file, whereas to system(3) he wants to pass something
like "cp user_specified_file somewhere_else".  this would be really easy to
do with exec/fork(2), something like 
execl("/bin/cp", "cp", "userfile", "otherfile", NULL), but again, there
are similar security implications to system(3) if this is setuid root.
I think really the best thing to do here is just do the code that does the
copying with read/write, since it's less complex than exec/fork anyway,
and doesn't have the same security troubles.

--sean



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