From: Jeremy Henty <jeremy@...>
Date: 2003-01-04T07:54:41+09:00
Subject: Re: ENV.clear

In article <slrnb1blu8.ftv.jeremy@ganglion.demon.co.uk>, Jeremy Henty
(ie. me) wrote:

> In article <1041481251.819565.3200.nullmailer@picachu.netlab.jp>,
> Yukihiro Matsumoto wrote:
> 
>> "clear" is not supported by ENV, just because I considered removing
>> all environment variables might not be intentional.
> 
> Why?  When writing Perl scripts in a security-conscious way I often
> deleted all environment variables, then set a chosen few (PATH,
> typically) to safe values.  Is this an unusual thing to want to do?

Thinking about it further, in this case I really want ENV to respond
to "replace" rather than "clear".  Currently (ie. in 1.6.8) it does
not.  I would argue that ENV.replace is *much* less likely to be
unintentional than ENV.clear because although one rarely wants to
delete the environment entirely (eg. do you *ever* want an empty
PATH?) it is often sensible to reset it to some fixed value.

Convinced?

Regards, 

Jeremy Henty