.desktop file security

[Patryk Zawadzki]

On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 1:40 PM, Simon McVittie
<simon.mcvittie at collabora.co.uk> wrote:
> On Tue, 24 Feb 2009 at 13:29:05 +0100, Alexander Larsson wrote:
>> On Tue, 2009-02-24 at 11:13 +0000, John Tapsell wrote:
>> > It's dangerous not to.  If it's marked as executable, and you execute
>> > it, it will try to be parsed by bash.  Most of the time this will just
>> > generate lots of "file not found" errors as bash tries to understand
>> > it, but it seems pretty dangerous to rely on this!
>>
>> Really, even if there is no #!/bin/sh ? How does it know to pick bash as
>> the interpreter for files like this?
> More accurately, /bin/sh will try to parse it (executable files that
> have no #! and no magic number recognised by the kernel are executed with
> /bin/sh). /bin/sh happens to be bash on most distributions, at least by
> default (but is dash on Ubuntu and on some Debian systems).

...and pdksh in other places.

What comes to mind is why would we want to use the executable bit for
non-executable files? I don't want my shell to tab-complete commands
that are not executable, be it .desktop, .mp3 or .foobar. If we
absolutely need to use the +x flag, use it only if extended attrs are
not provided or not available.

Also using extended filesystem attributes (or some other metadata
storage) gives you the additional protection from "downloaded a
tarball / uncompressed to desktop / the file was compressed as
executable / now I have two computer icons" kind of scenarios.

-- 
Patryk Zawadzki