[pve-devel] avoid possible harmful <> pattern when reading from STDIN

Thomas Lamprecht t.lamprecht at proxmox.com
Mon Jan 22 10:52:10 CET 2018


Fixes problems in CLIHandler using the code pattern:

while (my $line = <>) {
    ...
}

For why this causes only _now_ problems lets first look how <>
behaves:

"The null filehandle <> is special: [...] Input from <> comes either
from standard input, or from each file listed on the command line.
Here's how it works: the first time <> is evaluated, the @ARGV array
is checked, and if it is empty, $ARGV[0] is set to "-" , which when
opened gives you standard input.  The @ARGV array is then processed
as a list of filenames." - 'perldoc perlop'

Recent changes in the CLIHandler code changed how we modfiied @ARGV
Earlier we assumed that the first argument must be the command and
thus shifted it out of @ARGV, now we can have multiple levels of
(sub)commands. This change also changed how we handle @ARGV, we do
not unshift anything but go through the arguments until we got to
the final command and copy the rest of @ARGV as we know that this
must be the commandos arguments.

For '<>' this means that ARGV was still fully populated and perl
tried to open element as a file, which naturally failed.
Thus the change in pve-common only exposed this 'dangerous' code
pattern.

After I saw that all usages of this pattern in our code base are not
required, and even rather dangerous I assembled this series by using:

find -iname '*.pm' -exec sed -i 's/= <>/= <STDIN>/g' {} \;





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