To understand the setuid bit, let’s first see what happens when I try to cat a file that belongs to root:

su -
# I am now root; fear me
touch no-one-can-touch-me
chmod 600 no-one-can-touch-me
exit
cat no-one-can-touch-me
# cat: Permission denied 

Next, I’ll create a shell script that cats the file:

#!/bin/bash
 
cat no-one-can-touch-me

And make the script setuid root:

su -
chown root:root script.sh
chmod +xs script.sh

If I now execute the script, I still get the permission denied. What I need to make this work is a wrapper program. For that, I refer to Wiebe’s post about the same subject. (Yeah, I know: why bother publishing this if Wiebe already did an excellent job explaining? Well, I just hate to throw away an otherwise fine draft.)

I’m not sure if I’ll ever really use it, because I tend to start my Google queries from Vimperator’s command-line, but nice to know that it’s there.

And there’s another bookmark deleted…

cannot open `+6' for reading: No such file or directory 

This line caused it:

sum1=`tail +6 $0 | cksum | sed -e 's/ /Z/' -e 's/   /Z/' | cut -dZ -f1`

To fix it, I set this environment variable:

export _POSIX2_VERSION=199209

Apparently, this makes programs behave differently. Research is required to find out exactly what it does…

wget -q -O - http://www.assheads.nl/dehuilenderappers/?p=nummers \
| sed --quiet -e 's#^.*<a href="\(nummers/.*\.mp3\).*$#\1#p' \
| sort -u \
| wget -i - -B 'http://www.assheads.nl/dehuilenderappers/'

The same command-line, now using GNU long options to increase readability:

wget --quiet --output-document=- http://www.assheads.nl/dehuilenderappers/?p=nummers \
| sed --quiet --expression='s#^.*<a href="\(nummers/.*\.mp3\).*$#\1#p' \
| sort --unique \
| wget --input-file=- --base='http://www.assheads.nl/dehuilenderappers/'

By default, XTerm comes with warts:

• It has an ugly, small font.
• What’s up with the black on white? I’m a 1337 h4x0r and I want a black background, damnit!
• Double-click Selections is unintuitive.
• Where are the tabs?

But its warts are easily removed.

The font is small and ugly

Easily solved:

$ xrdb -merge
/* I want pretier fonts */
XTerm*faceName: Liberation Mono
XTerm*faceSize: 10
[Ctrl+D]
$ xterm

The black on white is an insult to my 1337ness

No longer so:

$ xrdb -merge
/* I want a 1337-style color-scheme */
XTerm*background: black
XTerm*Foreground: Grey
[Ctrl+D]
$ xterm

Now I can install my 1337 hacking tools in style! (If only I could install 1337 hacking skills as easily.)

Double-click selections are unintuitive

Most terminal emulators let you double-click to quickly select words. XTerm does this as well, but its definition of a “word” is a bit narrow if you’re used to other programs. The good news is that XTerm is extremely configurable in this sense. It lets you decide what to select on double-click, on triple-click, all the way up to 5 clicks. You can define the boundaries of the selection by means of presets such as line, group and page, but what I like best is its ability to use regular expressions. This lets you do cool things, like, for example, using one click to select a word, two clicks to select a sentence, and three clicks to select a paragraph.

My own configuration is a bit simple, probably a testimony to how little code I write these days:

$ xrdb -merge
/* The selection only stops at spaces and newlines */
XTerm*on2Clicks: regex [^  \n]+
[Ctrl+D]

Where are my tabs

You should really be using GNU Screen instead, which has too many advantages to name here. It even allows you to do Remote pair programming over SSH.

If you use Screen within an XTerm, be sure to add to following to your X configuration.

$ echo "XTerm*metaSendsEscape: true" | xrdb -merge

Otherwise, you might find yourself unable to control Screen

Saving your configuration

Ready to save your precious configuration?

$ xrdb -edit .Xdefaults

You’re done. It’s time to go brag to your friends.

First, disable the user’s account by running:

usermod --lock [user]

This way, only public key authentication is allowed. Then, when adding the user’s key to the ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file, prefix it with this:

command="/usr/local/bin/svnserve -t",no-port-forwarding,no-pty,no-agent-forwarding,no-X11-forwarding

I used our wrapper script in /usr/local/bin as the command, because it sets an umask of 002 before actually running svnserve. This is necessary when using svn+ssh access.

The source for this trick explains it in more detail.

Hi Rowan,
as you are interested in tricks and curiosities, I send you a thing.
I wanted a script to be runnable from both windows and linux and I found out a way to do it. Generally you can have two different files, one for each OS, but I started with this goal in mind and then it became a challenge. After trying a bit, playing with the strangest tricks of the two batch languages (bat and bash), I ended up with this solution. Actually it is not so useful but anyway…

Well Luca, regardless of the usefulness of your script, I happen to think that it’s pure genius, so I’m going to share it here:

echo off
echo ; set +v # > NUL
echo ; function GOTO { true; } # > NUL
 
GOTO WIN
# bash part, replace it to suit your needs
exit 0
 
:WIN
REM win part, replace it to suit your needs

Give the script a .bat extension for Windows and set the executable bit(s) for Unix.

Thanks, Luca, for sharing another nice trick with us.