this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2023
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Linux

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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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[–] [email protected] 40 points 1 year ago (2 children)

TL;DR

sudo rm -rf /* # can't have problems without a system
[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Copy. Paste. Enter.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

System administrators hate this trick!

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Ok, this is a very good cheat sheet

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Thefuck is a cool program, but I stopped using it because it was slow.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I haven't had as much luck with that program as I'd like to. :(

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

My .bash_history using this program...

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

sites like this are neat until you remember that curl's willingness to write ansi escape codes to stdout when it is a tty (as this site relies on to format the output when the user agent is curl) is actually a security vulnerability.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Could you give me an ELI5 please

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

This post The Terminal Escapes: Engineering unexpected execution from command line interfaces has a summary of the longer paper in the first link.

tldr: There are a variety of ways that attackers can cause you to execute execute arbitrary code when you echo their maliciously-crafted data to your terminal. Therefore, when you run curl without redirecting its output, or when you cat a file you've downloaded, you're trusting the server (and also the network, when you don't have https:// in the url) not to exploit you.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Ah ok that makes sense, thank you!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm more-inclined to blame a virtual terminal than the program writing the sequences if there's an exploit there.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Of course the terminal emulators are ultimately to blame but when there are so many problems in so many of them, imo curl's default behavior should be to filter its output when writing to a tty.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

is there a curl argument that can be used to block this behavior?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

You can redirect curl's output to a file with the -o filename option (or with > filename for shell redirection). But in the case of sites like this which output ansi-escape-formatted data that isn't very useful.

Also, after saving unknown data to a file it's common to look at it with less or perhaps xxd or strings or file ... all of which have had their own CVEs in recent years 🤦

Computer security is a fractal of bad news.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)
cheat() {
  curl cht.sh/$1
}
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Appears to be the same developer as wttr.in

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

IIRC this site uses TLDR pages