#7950: add warning about security implications of shell=True to subprocess docs

Patch by Chris Rebert.
This commit is contained in:
R. David Murray 2010-11-12 00:35:31 +00:00
parent ea3e91e06a
commit c7399d0a0f
1 changed files with 18 additions and 0 deletions

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@ -76,6 +76,24 @@ This module defines one class called :class:`Popen`:
Popen(['/bin/sh', '-c', args[0], args[1], ...])
.. warning::
Executing shell commands that incorporate unsanitized input from an
untrusted source makes a program vulnerable to `shell injection
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_injection#Shell_injection>`_,
a serious security flaw which can result in arbitrary command execution.
For this reason, the use of *shell=True* is **strongly discouraged** in cases
where the command string is constructed from external input::
>>> from subprocess import call
>>> filename = input("What file would you like to display?\n")
What file would you like to display?
non_existent; rm -rf / #
>>> call("cat " + filename, shell=True) # Uh-oh. This will end badly...
*shell=False* does not suffer from this vulnerability; the above Note may be
helpful in getting code using *shell=False* to work.
On Windows: the :class:`Popen` class uses CreateProcess() to execute the child
program, which operates on strings. If *args* is a sequence, it will be
converted to a string using the :meth:`list2cmdline` method. Please note that