Except that GNU is Not UNIX and many companies still have UNIX boxes without GNU on them.
And the last time I came across one of those I compiled and used modern tools.
Because even 20 year old Linux versions had tab complete and a vi that worked with directional keys
I do occasionally ssh into boxes were I am a lame user without compilers installed.
(At least they have ssh and not telnet)
What you can sometimes do is pick an alternate shell or find some other editor someone 'left lying around' (even typing vim instead of vi can give you something different)
And sometimes "tab completion" works with \ or ESC or something similar, I don't remember exactly
Well I recently went into ones that only had ssh, but then files were also copied over plain FTP or NFS.
What was more amazing was people using X for accessing a terminal. You know, because that's how someone told to use it, so they just went with the flow.
This isn't windows, after all.
1 - You can put them there;
2 - You have enough quota;
3- $HOME isn't mounted as noexec;
4 - IT don't have scripts that purge $HOME from executables, which the corresponding penalties for the respective user when found.
I am not a UNIX newbie, although I favor Windows.
I know UNIX since Xenix, and used DG/UX, Aix, HP-UX, Solaris, OS X, FreeBSD and lots of GNU/Linux distributions starting with Slackware 2.0.
After a decade of using UNIX like systems, and Windows as well, while researching everything that came out of Xerox PARC, and being an Oberon user for a short while, I came to realize that Apple and Microsoft developer cultures are closer to Xerox dreams of how computing should look like, than UNIX where X Windows is just a manager of xterms.
Also I never was a big fan of C, even back on MS-DOS days, where I would rather use Turbo Pascal or Turbo C++.
I worked in a Solaris shop that had gnu coreutils and packages installed everywhere with a <g> prefix, and another place running openbsd which had the same.
gecho, gcat, gln etc;
I'm pretty sure gnu coreutils can be built on any Unix-like OS.
- base64encode it
- paste the encoded text over ssh to a file
- base64decode it
- chmod +x the decoded file
- …
- profit
- Disable execution bit for all directories for home
- If the UNIX variant allows it, jail/contain home for each user session
- Punish users or their employer if a consulting firm severely that bypass IT regulations
/usr/bin/env $your_binary
So I wanted to ask: where such a level of security would be required? And also, what attacks does it defend from?
You'll probably go insane doing it
(Linux x86 compiling to Linux ARM/PPC/etc is doable and done quite frequently)