> Something like 'apropos /bin/bash' doesn't do anything useful anyway.
Right, but 'cd /bin; apropos *' does - and still has exactly the same
problem as I originally reported. As to 'whatis', I had tested it before
writing up this bug; it produces a totally different set of results,
including throwing a dozen 'nothing appropriate' warnings when run in a
similar manner (which also seems wrong, to me: e.g., 'apropos
nc.openbsd' has no problem telling me what it is, but 'whatis' does):
ben@feynman:/bin$ apropos * > /tmp/apr.out
ben@feynman:/bin$ whatis * > /tmp/what.out
nc.openbsd: nothing appropriate.
ntfsck: nothing appropriate.
ntfsdecrypt: nothing appropriate.
ntfsdump_logfile: nothing appropriate.
ntfsmftalloc: nothing appropriate.
ntfsmove: nothing appropriate.
ntfstruncate: nothing appropriate.
ntfswipe: nothing appropriate.
plymouth: nothing appropriate.
plymouth-upstart-bridge: nothing appropriate.
static-sh: nothing appropriate.
ulockmgr_server: nothing appropriate.
ben@feynman:/bin$ wc -l /tmp/{apr,what}.out
6214 /tmp/apr.out
161 /tmp/what.out
6375 total
One possible (brute-force) answer to all of this might be to have
'apropos' only accept a single argument. It wouldn't stop anyone from
trying the above with, say, a 'for' loop, but at least they'd be aware
that they're running a largish number of processes. Also, given that
'whatis' isn't SUID, having both it and apropos resolve paths shouldn't
affect security.
Thank you for both your advice and your time and effort in resolving
this.
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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/927028
Title:
'apropos' maxes out CPU when run with '/bin/*' as argument
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