Sometime, probably in the paleozoic era, I wrote a little perl script I just came across again. \u00a0At the time \u00a0I was frustrated by commands in \/bin or \/usr\/bin not having documentation, even on a cleanly installed system… I guess I would think if something is important enough to install on a system you might want to tell your users what it does…\u00a0so I thought I’d look at how good\/bad it was.<\/p>\n
The little perl script below tries to run through the important command directories to find man pages in all the usual locations (or your MANPATH vars, also in \/etc\/man**{config,conf,cf} if set). \u00a0 The documentation tends to go down over time (as you install more commands in key places.)<\/p>\n
On my current ubuntu system (a now ancient 9.x)<\/p>\n
[table id=1\/]<\/strong><\/p>\n Kinda blows. \u00a0Almost 20% undocumented?<\/p>\n On the really blows side of things \/usr\/bin\/screen.real was SGID, \/usr\/bin\/X SGID\/SUID, and \/usr\/bin\/kde_init was SUID. \u00a0 How could you put a SUID program and not put a frickin’ man page?<\/p>\n Back in the day I used to have a table I kept with this stuff with various OS’s, but I can’t find it now. \u00a0As I recall commercial systems (such as solaris, etc) did tend to document more. \u00a0Well, what about\u00a0my mac? \u00a0Snow leopard mac (my script doesn’t look at things in \/Application and \/System… but there’s some interesting stuff there too, hmm; until then just looking at\u00a0traditional \/usr\/bin, \/bin, etc. types):<\/p>\n [table id=2\/]<\/strong><\/p>\n Well, 5% isn’t too bad. \u00a0Note the separate window commands; it used to be more interesting, but at least under my ubuntu \/usr\/X11R6\/bin is just linking back to \/usr\/bin and all the window stuff has been mashed in the general executable areas.<\/p>\n Although… on my personal system (I ran this on a fresher version) there’s actually one undocumented SUID: \/usr\/sbin\/qmasterd? \u00a0 Hmm – “site:apple.com \u00a0qmasterd -site:discussions.apple.com -site:discussions.info.apple.com” gives me 6 hits in english. \u00a0None document qmasterd, although it looks like part of the compressor package. \u00a0Shame, apple.<\/p>\n And… just in, a Centos 5.6, the Red Hat enterprise clone addition.<\/p>\n [table id=3\/]<\/strong> OK, you might say mount.nfs4 & umount.nfs4 are the same as *mount.nfs, which is documented… but they actually are different programs, with different sizes and at least some different code. \u00a0 Hmm, 14 unique and 17 total mount commands in \/sbin. \u00a0 Most look like games – do we still need the SGID bit on those? :) And… “find \/ -perm -4000” gives two more undocumented ones, \/usr\/*\/nspluginwrapper (actually 2 of those), and \/lib64\/dbus-1\/dbus-daemon-launch-helper.<\/p>\n So down to only 5 or more. And those 700+ others.<\/p>\n [attachments]<\/p>\n\r\n
\nand… almost 50% of SUID\/SGID without a man page?<\/p>\n
\n\/sbin\/umount.nfs4
\n\/usr\/bin\/same-gnome
\n\/usr\/bin\/gnibbles
\n\/usr\/bin\/iagno
\n\/usr\/bin\/gnotravex
\n\/usr\/bin\/gataxx
\n\/usr\/bin\/gtali
\n\/usr\/bin\/mahjongg
\n\/usr\/bin\/gnomine
\n\/usr\/bin\/gnotski
\n\/usr\/bin\/gnobots2
\n\/usr\/bin\/glines
\n\/usr\/sbin\/userisdnctl
\n\/usr\/sbin\/ccreds_validate
\n\/usr\/libexec\/libvirt_proxy<\/div><\/div>\nAttachments<\/h3>\r\n