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Fix your Ruby environment problems

10 points| youngian | 11 years ago |technotes.iangreenleaf.com

4 comments

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mnarayan01|11 years ago

  export PATH=./bin:$PATH
Am I the only one who thinks adding this to your login scripts is a terrible idea?

jbrechtel|11 years ago

No, you're not alone.

To be explicit about why, for others, this means your shell will search for executables in a 'bin' sub directory of whatever directory you happen to be in BEFORE it searches your normal path.

This allows for common commands like 'ls' to be executed from ./bin, if they're present, instead of /bin (from your system).

Once you've done this you've opened yourself up to an attack where you download a zip from the internet, extract it, cd into the directory and type 'ls' and you may have potentially executed something from that zip which you didn't intend to do.

tldr - relative paths in your $PATH is a bad idea.