@Anthon Is edit/update officially disapproved of by SE, or is there some other concensus I missed? I use edit/update myself.

@FaheemMitha The help tour is quite clear: just questions and answers. A question that is updated and forces all future readers to read "EDIT" (I am not talking about the information that follows) wastes time for non-information as almost all future readers never saw or will see a version of the question without the addition.

And it tends to prevent people from rewriting their question and integrate the information remove old unclear stuff (that does mostly not apply to adding output of some utility), as well as contain stuff that the OP should put in a comment (to a comment or some other answer).

It is like putting a PS in an email. It is just laziness to go back and rewrite part of the email before sending (of course on non-editable paper mail this was different). Such laziness is fine if you write informally to a friend, but it is a sign of not well thought through communication

@Anthon I think you forgot to add a "not" there.

One argument to add EDIT or UPDATE at the end is that people who have already looked at your question can easily see there was a change (or changes) made.

@FaheemMitha Those few should, if they deem it necessary because they don't want to re-read the whole question, look at the edit history. If they asked for the output of some command in a comment, they're bound to notice the inclusion without having to resort to that.

@Anthon ok

@FaheemMitha Essentially my argument is: keep the questions clean for all future visitors, and use the mechanism in place (the edit history) for those who need to see what changed.

@Anthon Ok, fair enough. You say this is in the help section? Can you point me to the relevant language?

Hi. I am maintaining build resources. I am not really a linux pro and I've been asked to apply "sudo setcap cap_sys_admin=+eip $(which attr)" to build machines. Do I understand correctly that I would grant admin privileges to attr command?

what risks am I facing by doing so?

@ErkiM. asked by who and to what purpose?

Asked by people who build software on the machines, so currently the user who actually executes ant, maven or whatever has limited access, he is not in sudoers etc. The purpose would be to set xattr attributes to the attr command. I am trying to understand which possible security related vectors it would add to those machines.

@ErkiM. building software should not require any kind of special privileges.

What distribution is this?

Well, except the installation of build dependencies.

In fact building sw as a privileged user is a very bad idea.

It should always just be done as a regular user.

so the building itself would be done under regular user but, as far as I understand, they need to do some prep. work, that would require additional privileges.

What I am trying to understand is what I would enable the user to do once I run this command.

Basically, which privileges the builder account would gain and what it would enable for him.

@ErkiM. installing build dependencies would require additional privileges, yes

probably basically equivalent to root.

I'd recommend some kind of sandboxing mechanism. give the user a virtual machine to build/install stuff in. if all goes well, it can be added to the main system.

lets clueless users do stuff on a system other people are using is a probable recipe for disaster.

Hello everyone ! First time here, I hope I am not rude. I am looking to execute somme command throught ssh using a variable on my local machine like : ssh x@y 'echo ${local_var}' but of course shell take the local_var on the remote machine wich is therefore empty. How would you do what I want to achive ?

Thanks in advance ! :)

@matovitch ask a question on the main site.

@Faheem ok

@matovitch Don't quote it or use double quotes

ssh x@y echo ${local_var}

or

 ssh x@y "echo ${local_var}"

That causes the variable to expanded locally before sending to the remote machine.

@terdon thank you I will try it right mow!

@FaheemMitha, thanks for your input. Anyway, could you give me any cases what this would actually enable the user to do? From man "enable users to perform operations on trusted and security Extended Attributes" - what can this mean in worst case?

@ErkiM. You are far more likely to get good, definitive answers if you ask on the main site. That sounds like an interesting question.

@ErkiM. I agree with @terdon. If you have a clearly defined, on-topic question, ask on the main site. If you don't then here might be a reasonable place to clarify things.

hi anyone here?

@terdon?

@AndyK what's happening?

@AndyK Yes?

Some small issues with awk. I've been helped.

@terdon : how are you?

@AndyK Fine, thanks

Someone on tex.sx said that pdftk is no longer being maintained. Does anyone know anything about this?

@FaheemMitha the last change seems to have been 1.5 years ago.

@muru that's a release.

indeed.

One would have expect some change to culminate in a release by now

@muru well, sometimes people are not in a hurry. I was unable to find a public repos for pdftk, so I don't know what the current state of development is.

y'all might want to test this if you have 2k on SO because I'm sure it would go to each and every site