On 8/24/12, adrelanos <adrela...@riseup.net> wrote: > Robert Ransom: >> On 8/24/12, Aaron Paden <aaronbpa...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> So I'm not an expert in shell or anything. I know there are a lot of >>> gotchas. It seems like it should be possible, though. Is there something >>> wrong with using pgrep or something? >> >> Several things: >> >> * pgrep isn't POSIX, and it isn't in GNU coreutils (as of version >> 8.13), so it probably won't exist on someone's Linux system. > > That's a really esoteric thing. Any half recent Linux system will have > it installed? POSIX is not esoteric. But there is a pgrep in the ‘procps’ package, which contains the POSIX-required ps command, and FreeBSD ships with a pgrep, so pgrep should be available everywhere TBB for Linux can be run anyway. > If not, in long run there will (hopefully) be packages and TBB should > depend on pgrep (if decided to use it). No. If the Tor Browser is packaged properly for a Linux distribution, it will be configured to use a system-wide Tor instance, and it won't use any of the startup crap that TBB includes. > If Mike wants to fulfill the esoteric requirement to POSIX and coreutils > pre 8.13 compatible, the script could test if pgrep exists and leave > them with the current behavior. I assumed that if pgrep were ubiquitous on Linux systems, it would be in coreutils (bad assumption), so I looked there. I only stated the version of coreutils that I checked because I didn't want to go hunt for the most recent version of coreutils. >> * pgrep only indicates that there is some process named “tor” (or >> “vidalia”) running, not that the specific Tor or Vidalia shipped in >> TBB is running. > > I fail to see the problem? Please elaborate. Tor Browser should also be > compatible with system wide installed Tor/Vidalia. (i.e. apt-get install > tor vidalia) No. TBB is intended to not interact with a system-wide Tor instance in any way. >> * There is currently no way for any program not started by TBB-Vidalia >> to determine which ports TBB-Tor is listening on, and there is no way >> for any such program to determine what control-port password Torbutton >> will need in order to send TBB-Tor a ‘SIGNAL NEWNYM’ command (required >> for the ‘New Identity’ command to work). (See also >> https://bugs.torproject.org/6609 .) > > What's the suggested solution here? Why not write those data into a file > or environment variable? TBB-Vidalia does write all of that information into environment variables, which is why only programs which it starts have easy access to it. The control-port password will never be written to a file because any attacker who can authenticate to a Tor instance's control port can completely destroy its user's anonymity. Robert Ransom _______________________________________________ tor-talk mailing list tor-talk@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk