Shell syntax is too complicated to detect command substitution and unquoted
operators reliably without implementing much of sh's parser. Therefore, have
sh do this detection.
While changing sh's support anyway, also read input from a pipe instead of
arguments to avoid {ARG_MAX} limits and improve privacy, and output count
and length using 16 instead of 8 digits.
The basic concept is:
execl("/bin/sh", "sh", "-c", "freebsd_wordexp ${1:+\"$1\"} -f "$2",
"", flags & WRDE_NOCMD ? "-p" : "", <pipe with words>);
The WRDE_BADCHAR error is still implemented in libc. POSIX requires us to
fail strings containing unquoted braces with code WRDE_BADCHAR. Since this
is normally not a syntax error in sh, there is still a need for checking
code in libc, we_check().
The new we_check() is an optimistic check that all the characters
<newline> | & ; < > ( ) { }
are quoted. To avoid duplicating too much sh logic, such characters are
permitted when quoting characters are seen, even if the quoting characters
may themselves be quoted. This code reports all WRDE_BADCHAR errors; bad
characters that get past it and are a syntax error in sh return WRDE_SYNTAX.
Although many implementations of WRDE_NOCMD erroneously allow some command
substitutions (and ours even documented this), there appears to be code that
relies on its security (codesearch.debian.net shows quite a few uses).
Passing untrusted data to wordexp() still exposes a denial of service
possibility and a fairly large attack surface.
Reviewed by: wblock (man page only)
MFC after: 2 weeks
Relnotes: yes
Security: fixes command execution with wordexp(untrusted, WRDE_NOCMD)
Distinguish between WRDE_BADVAL and WRDE_SYNTAX based on when the error
occurred (parsing or execution), not based on whether WRDE_UNDEF was passed.
Also, return WRDE_NOSPACE for a few more unexpected results from sh.
