Is evaluating random text dangerous? [closed]
I've been passing time this afternoon by generating random strings and passing them through Perl's eval
. The scripts are strings that contain only the following characters:
+-*$_.,/\@()%=`
Is there a statistically significant risk that I break something?
Note: I don't pass it arguments like "rm -rf /"
.
Statistically significant from a statistician's point of view, no. From a programmers point of view yes. Any percentage of risk that can be avoided is too much.
$!
can resolve to a wide variety of strings, depending on platform and locale. So perhaps something like
eval "$!=$$/$.,`$!`"
has the potential for mischief.
My gut says that answering this question definitively (i.e., with an actual probability) would probably end up placing a bound on Chaitin's constant which is incomputable. So it's most likely not possible (mathematically speaking) to answer your question.
Why not just sandbox the Perl process if you're worried?
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