Quick notes about the bash bug, its impact, and the fixes so far
This is a perfect example of why you should never, ever put special magical values in-band with a facility which has a different purpose normally.<p>I know it's tempting and in many cases, it will save you a lot of work, but it will eventually lead to data corruption, or, way worse, a problem like this one here.<p>People in the office complain about my annoyed remarks when they succumb to the dark side and use some special values. My question "but what if a real value is ever sent that looks like one of these magic values?" is usually countered with "but who's ever going to send this value?".<p>This bug here is providing me with a perfect answer to that question: "Security researchers, or worse, bad guys".<p>There are so many ways of transferring functions to subshells that don't involve magic values in a free-form key/value store, but all of them would have been more complicated, so people chose the quick hack.<p>And now the sh*t has hit the fan :(