ssh-copy-id bugfix

Philip Hands
Wed, 25 Nov 2015 17:20:46 -0000

Nico Kadel-Garcia <nkadel at gmail.com> writes:

> On Wed, Nov 25, 2015 at 6:07 AM, Ruediger Meier <sweet_f_a at gmx.de>
wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> On Tuesday 24 November 2015, Radek Podgorny wrote:
>>> hello everyone!
>>>
>>> i'd like to sincerely ask you to include a fix for ssh-copy-id
bug
>>> i'll be linking below. it's a trivial fix which resolves
>>> https://bugzilla.mindrot.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2206 and eases life of
>>> many. it's been field-tested by redhat devs and users so i see
no
>>> problem in incorporating it.
>>>
>>>
http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/cgit/openssh.git/tree/openssh-6.8p1-fix
>>>-ss h-copy-id-on-non-sh-shell.patch
>
>> Personally I think it's hard enough to write POSIX compatible shell
>> scripts and I wouldn't start to add such hacks for fish and tcsh.
>> Next week somebody may complain that his "shell" does not
>> support "exec ...".
>
> Making things work for more people, when it doesn't introduce a
> security risk or break other tools, seems very reasonable. And there
> are people out there who who do use both fish and tcsh.
>
> What seems to be missing in the patch is a comment line, above the
> stanza, explaining why the code uses "exec".

My reading of the presence of "exec" there was:

  We're assuming that the current shell may not be to our liking, so
  there seems to be little point keeping it in memory solely so it can
  at worst somehow get in the way of a clean exit.

Does that really need a comment?  I'm not sure I can make a succinct
explanation of what's going on for anyone that doesn't already know what
exec does.  Feel free to make suggestions though.

Cheers, Phil.
--
|)|  Philip Hands  [+44 (0)20 8530 9560]  HANDS.COM Ltd.
|-|  http://www.hands.com/    http://ftp.uk.debian.org/
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