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Re: [perl #126271] File::Glob issue

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From:
Karl Williamson
Date:
October 6, 2015 16:02
Subject:
Re: [perl #126271] File::Glob issue
Message ID:
5613F068.8070504@khwilliamson.com
On 10/05/2015 01:59 PM, Ed Avis wrote:
> karl williamson <perlbug-followup <at> perl.org> writes:
>
>> my  @b = glob(qq{$path/mp_[0123456789]*.dat
>> 	$path/md_[0123456789]*.dat});
>>
>>from https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=114984 (and now in
>> ext/File-Glob/t/rt114984.t) now work fine on Linux unless it is compiled
>> with -DPERL_EXTERNAL_GLOB.  In that case, a shell is run instead of F:G,
>> and the shell thinks the 2nd line is a shell command instead of part of
>> what to glob.
>
> That sounds like a bug in the PERL_EXTERNAL_GLOB case.  Having your glob
> kick off a random shell command cannot be the intended behaviour.  I suggest
> that PERL_EXTERNAL_GLOB should convert \n to space or otherwise sanitize
> the glob pattern slightly before invoking the shell.  (It may never be
> possible to completely make the shell invocation safe while keeping
> compatibility with the current behaviour, but certainly this case can be
> fixed.)
>
>> I am not conversant in all the nuances of what bsd vs csh vs other
>> shells accept, but I believe this means that F:G is not an accurate
>> reproducer of what most shells would do with this, and I think it is
>> meant to be.
>
> Well... not in that way IMHO.  It should provide the same kind of glob
> expansion as shells do.  It doesn't and shouldn't try to reimplement all
> the interesting quoting bugs and code injection bugs that running an
> external shell is prone to.  (To do that it would indeed need to fork a
> shell and see what happens, and then there would be no point having F::G.)
>


I have pushed a fix to the .t file that was failing; I simply joined the 
two lines to make one.

It turns out that porting/maintainers.t also fails with 
PERL_EXTERNAL_GLOB on Linux.  I haven't looked at this.

It is my supposition that the core converting to use File::Glob was for 
performance reasons.  (Perhaps it was to also get more uniform handling 
across platforms.)  Since it's undocumented, perhaps someone could 
enlighten me.  One solution I thought of (that Zefram) doesn't like is 
for F:G to fork a shell if and only if it finds a shell metacharacter. 
That way the performance wouldn't suffer except in edge cases.

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