On: Don't copy paste from a website to a terminal

[wyldfire]

No, I just put my terminal into a mode where I could see what I pasted without any possibility executing it. If you don't give cat any arguments, it reads from stdin and writes to stdout.

I could have just as easily opened vim/emacs/notepad and done the same, or for that matter, written the contents to an actual file instead of redirecting the contents to /dev/null.

[e12e → wyldfire]

But you could still paste ^d (End-of-file)? Granted, if you paste ^d in the terminal, you'd exit, but one could do this?:

  dangerous-commands \n
  ^d #eof
  dangerous-commmands \n #repeat

(I'm not actually sure if you can paste ^d in general... but I expect you could?)

[wyldfire → e12e]

Great point, we've just fired another salvo in an escalating war. The only winning move is not to paste. :)

[vacri → wyldfire]

My dentist won't let me do that :(

[jnbiche → wyldfire]

Cool, I've used cat for years and never realized it would do that if you don't have something actually piping to it. Totally makes sense now.