For technical and non-technical users alike, maintaining a large installed base of Linux machines can be a harrowing experience for an administrator. Technical users take advantage of Linux®'s extreme configurability to change everything to their liking, while non-technical users running amok within their own file systems. This tutorial is the first in a two-part series that shows you how and why to lock those machines down to streamline the associated support and administration processes. In this tutorial, you learn how to remove the interpreters from the installation base system.
Traditionally, Unix/Linux/POSIX filenames can be almost any sequence of bytes, and their meaning is unassigned. The only real rules are that "/" is always the directory separator, and that filenames can't contain byte 0 (because this is the terminator). Although this is flexible, this creates many unnecessary problems. In particular, this lack of limitations makes it unnecessarily difficult to write correct programs (enabling many security flaws), makes it impossible to consistently and accurately display filenames, causes portability problems, and confuses users. more ....
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