[Nano-devel] preventing a root-owned .nano dir

[Benno Schulenberg]

When nano is first run under sudo, and .nanorc contains
'set historylog' or 'set poslog', nano will create a .nano
directory in the user's home directory  that is root-owned.
It has happened to me once; it is annoying.

Proposed patch (attached) fixes this: when nano detects it
is being run as root, it will ignore $HOME and get the home
directory from the /etc/passwd file (which will normally
contain /root as the home dir for root).

(What I don't get, though, is that my sudoers file contains
'env_reset', which should cause HOME to become unset, but
still nano sees that HOME is set to /home/ben when running
'sudo nano'.  How?)

Anyway, the patch prevents the root user from steering
through the HOME environment variable where nano will look
for its .nanorc file and .nano/ history files.  Would that
be an acceptable small sacrifice?  Chris?  Others?

Benno

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prevent-root-owned-.nano-dir.patch
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