If you like man trivia (and why else would you be reading this?) you could check out the top comment at https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/405783/why-does-man...
(discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27994194)
(discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27994194)
Discovered this in college when I was shoulder surfing a coworker who always used the username Tyler. When he typed shutdown I called it out, and he said, "wait, it doesn't do that for you? I always assumed it said that for everyone and just replaced the username!".
(For those of you too young to know, it's a reference to an Aerosmith song)
Haha! Adequate amount of fun was provided, please resume regular man activities.
Which means you need to usually make it explicit to call them (man --abba or something) than something that "surprises" the user.
They fell out of favor when people realized they were a security issue, because it was a code path that rarely got tested.
In Star Trek: 25th Anniversary, we had a hidden animation of Captain Kirk's toupee jumping off his head and running out of the room. It was caught before release and they made us take it out since no one wanted to piss off William Shatner.
Proper code doesn't either, and yet there they are! The point is they added another attack surface, however small, and another code path that should be tested.
When people started to care about 100% test coverage, they started to disappear.
I dunno, "attack surface" to me means "facilitate opening/vulnerability somehow" and none of the easter egg code I've seen has done that. You have any concrete examples where a easter egg made possible a security vulnerability that wouldn't be possible otherwise?
But yes, another code path created by easter eggs that wasn't tested I've seen countless of times, but never been an issue, but maybe our easter eggs always been too small in scope for that.
https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/144202/are-ther...