But a colleague did some experiments (on SuSE 9.3) and found that ps only displays the environment for processes you own, which seems very sensible. Likewise /proc/pid/environ is only readable by the owner (or by root, of
course).
That's not true at all. ps will show any process on the system. For
example, `ps aux` shows every
process running.
The question about environment variables being safe...
The short answer is obviously "no".
What exactly are you trying to accomplish by storing passwords in
environment variables?
Tim Rainier
Information Services, Kalsec, INC
trainier@kalsec.com
Bob Vickers
I have a question about privacy of environment variables. I was always brought up to believe that you must never store passwords or other sensitive information in environment variables, because the environment is visible to other users. This is certainly true on older Unix systems.
But a colleague did some experiments (on SuSE 9.3) and found that ps only displays the environment for processes you own, which seems very sensible. Likewise /proc/pid/environ is only readable by the owner (or by root, of
course).
Now I don't want to rely on experiments, because there may be some other
mechanism I haven't thought of. Can anyone point me to some authoritative information about the privacy of environment variables on modern Linux systems?
The reason I ask is that my colleague is writing a script which will run
rpcclient and smbclient. One option would be to use Expect, but environment variables are a much cleaner and simpler solution providing they are safe.
Many thanks, Bob ============================================================== Bob Vickers R.Vickers@cs.rhul.ac.uk Dept of Computer Science, Royal Holloway, University of London
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