jklowden@schemamania.org (James K. Lowden) writes:
> The we-sell-rope principle suggests ls(1) should write the filenames
> to its output, and let the bytes fall where they may.

Personally, I wouldn't want my tools to filter like that, but figured
someone must have felt strongly enough about having this filtering to
hack it into ls(1).  It strikes me that hacking such a filter into
each application is the wrong way to approach this problem.  If a
terminal has a security problem with answerback or some escape
sequences that change modes, then the right place to put a security
filter is in the TTY driver since it will catch attacks via any
userland program that was tricked into emitting dangerous sequences.

I can see why folks might have hacked this filter into ls(1) back in
the days of vt100's.  The filter would never have prevented anything
that should have been displayed from being displayed.  I don't think
it solved much, but it didn't hurt much either.

-wolfgang