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Comment by cmccabe | Hacker News Reader

exec.Command doesn't run a shell; it just executes the command. So yes, it's perfectly safe to have spaces and other shell metacharacters in there. Whether or not it's efficient here is another question, of course.

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So yes, it's perfectly safe to have spaces and other shell metacharacters in there.

You could (for instance) probe content of system files by passing

  -f/some/file

And matching that to the log. If you have some control over the log, you could use this to read content from system files. Of course, it's all indirect, since the file is interpreted as containing regular expressions. But it's certainly not 'perfectly safe'.

I could also read content from system files by using the advanced hacker tool "cat".

I don't see what this has to do with exec.Command.

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