root wants to use perldoc

[Dan Jacobson]

# perldoc -f my
Superuser must not run /usr/bin/perldoc without security audit and taint checks.

Gee whiz, what if man(1) did that too? grep, ls?
Can't perldoc be made safe? Why can't it just call itself again, this
time as user 'nobody' or something.

The point is I only have a limited set of windows and don't want to
open another. Or I'm working on the single console and just want to
check a quick doc. Anyway, I don't want to have to check my id before
I say perldoc.

What do I have to do? Make a ~root/bin/perldoc:
su -c "/usr/bin/perldoc $@" nobody #untested
Ugh.

 

[Sam Holden]

# perldoc -f my
Superuser must not run /usr/bin/perldoc without security audit and taint checks.

Gee whiz, what if man(1) did that too? grep, ls?
Can't perldoc be made safe? Why can't it just call itself again, this
time as user 'nobody' or something.

The point is I only have a limited set of windows and don't want to
open another. Or I'm working on the single console and just want to
check a quick doc. Anyway, I don't want to have to check my id before
I say perldoc.

What do I have to do? Make a ~root/bin/perldoc:
su -c "/usr/bin/perldoc $@" nobody #untested
Ugh.

You RTFM. "man perldoc"

Paying particular attention to the "-U" option

 

[Dan Wilga]

You RTFM. "man perldoc"

Paying particular attention to the "-U" option

While the -U option is present in the OPTIONS section of this man page,
it is, interestingly, absent from the synopsis (5.8.0). IMHO, this
should be corrected if it has not already.