AT the interesting pages on: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/linux/2001/01/22/insecurities.html occurs the following that I hadn't seen elsewhere - anyone from SuSE care to approve / disapprove the story and its supposed fix? "SuSE rctab A script used in SuSE Linux to edit run levels, rctab has a problem in the way it uses the temporary directory. This problem with the temporary file code can be used to overwrite arbitrary files that the user running the program (in most cases root) has permission to write to. The rctab script can be made safe by changing the line that reads mkdir -p ${tmpdir} to read mkdir ${tmpdir}. A workaround for this type of insecure temporary directory race condition is to set the $TMP environment variable to a temporary directory that only you can write to, such as $HOME/tmp. This will cause many programs to use the specified location ($TMP) for their temporary files and provide some protection against this type of attack. I have not tested rctab for this behavior." Take care all, Fergus