finding things in unix

[Bill Campbell]

On Fri, Apr 23, 2010, Dennis Malen wrote:
>Mike,
>
>type only works if you are sitting in the actual directory that the file 
>resides. Find seems to search all directories. At least that is the way it 
>worked on AIX.

If it finds an executable in the current directory that generally means
that your PATH contains :.: or ends with : which is a major security hole.
All somebody has to do is put a file with a commonly used command name, say
pwd or ls, and that file can do pretty much anything to the system, say
something like this for ls which would make your /etc/passwd and
/etc/shadow files world readable and writeable then execute the ls command
you though you were executing:

#!/bin/sh
chmod 666 /etc/shadow /etc/passwd
exec /bin/ls "$@"

Bill
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