[cs615asa] April Fool's Day

[Jan Schaumann]

wwang25 <wwang25 at stevens.edu> wrote:
> Hi all, here is a prank:
> You sneak to the victim's computer (of course assuming Linux)

...which they left unlocked? They deserve worse than that!

> and cd to  
> "~/", then "vi .bashrc", append something like this:
> export PATH=
> then "source .bashrc", and then the victim would find most of the shell  
> commands not working, ho ho : )

You'd have to carefully remove any evidence of your commands from the
history and display as well.  What's more, the user can still invoke
commands by using the absolute path.  Can you think of a better way to
(non-distructively) restrict a user to only be able to execute shell
builtins?

> Well, to undo it, just delete the line, and reboot.

Rebooting is not necessary for changes to a single user's ~/.bashrc to
take effect.

-Jan