Re: escaping tn5250 in a locked down environment

On Mon, 3 May 2004, Josh Tanski wrote:

> recycle some "obsolete" PCs.  Are there any "shell escapes" or any other way
> the user could break out of tn5250 and execute external commands?  I want it

There are no shell escapes in tn5250 (i.e. you can't load a unix command
line interpreter).  You could possibly introduce some problems by the way
you run it.  For example, if you run tn5250 from a script or program that
gives the uses shell access then that could be a concern, but it would not
be the fault of tn5250.

lp5250d may be a different story, however.  I haven't tried this, but I'm
not sure what the consequences would be of putting /bin/sh as the
parameter to the outputcommand argument.  Someone else will have to
address that.  But if your system really is locked down, the users won't
be able to modify the outputcommand argument, so the point may be moot.

James Rich

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