Re: Gnuplot qua Web-Service

[Ethan M. <merritt@u.washington.edu>]

On Thursday 28 December 2006 09:08, Peter Danenberg wrote:
>      I'm running Gnuplot as a web-service, and would like to
> castrate its feral shell- and system-facilities; would  any-
> one  mind  inspecting  the  attached  patch to command.c for
> unintended consequences?

The particular code chunk you are eviscerating is only the
tip of the iceberg [to mix metaphors hideously]. 

Shell substitution and file/pipe creation are built into gnuplot
in multiple places.  Consider statements like
   set print "/var/www/html/index.html";  print pi
Would this trash the main page of your web site?
What about
  plot "/etc/passwd" using 0:(0):1 with labels
or
  plot "< /usr/bin/reboot"

I really don't think that gutting gnuplot's internal code is the
way to approach this.  You should rather look into chroot and
other mechanisms of isolating the web server environment
itself from the rest of the system.