Puzzle of the Day

One college did not want students to have access to the UNIX shell, so they built a menu system to provide another interface. All users had their normal shell (sh(1)), but their .profile exec'd the menu system (written in csh).

  1. Many users broke out of this to get the regular shell. How?
To prevent this, the system administrators made this menu the users' shell. So, in the passwd file, the shell field was set to /usr/local/menu.sh. The menu gave you access to some programs, such as rm(1), without specifying a path.
  1. Do you think this solved the problem?

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Department of Computer Science
University of California at Davis
Davis, CA 95616-8562


Page last modified on 3/9/98