On 09/06/15 09:27, Pierre Gaston wrote: > Well it tries to execute the file and show the lines where it gets an > error, it's a useful behavior when you try to write a script. > > If you have read access to these files and can run bash, you can print > them anyway eg: > > bash -c 'echo "$(</etc/passwd)" ' > > so it's hardly a security issue. > I'd say it's not one at all. Any security issue here would not be bash's fault. If bash can read the file, then so can any other program on the system. There are exceptions: if you set bash as suid/sgid which you shouldn't do, or if you have a poor MAC configuration in your OS (e.g. poorly configured SELinux/GRSecurity).
The reason it shows as an error is because in the example given (bash -i /etc/passwd), bash is being instructed to treat /etc/passwd as a bash script. It's not a bash script, so bash complains about it. You could as easily get the contents of /etc/passwd using 'cat'.
