Basics of a Bash action game

If you want to write an action game in bash, you need the ability to check for user input without actually waiting for it. While bash doesn’t let you poll the keyboard in a great way, it does let you wait for input for a miniscule amount of time with read -t 0.0001.

Here’s a snippet that demonstrates this by bouncing some text back and forth, and letting the user control position and color. It also sets (and unsets) the necessary terminal settings for this to look good:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

# Reset terminal on exit
trap 'tput cnorm; tput sgr0; clear' EXIT

# invisible cursor, no echo
tput civis
stty -echo

text="j/k to move, space to color"
max_x=$(($(tput cols) - ${#text}))
dir=1 x=1 y=$(($(tput lines)/2))
color=3

while sleep 0.05 # GNU specific!
do
    # move and change direction when hitting walls
    (( x == 0 || x == max_x )) && \
        ((dir *= -1))
    (( x += dir ))


    # read all the characters that have been buffered up
    while IFS= read -rs -t 0.0001 -n 1 key
    do
        [[ $key == j ]] && (( y++ ))
        [[ $key == k ]] && (( y-- ))
        [[ $key == " " ]] && color=$((color%7+1))
    done

    # batch up all terminal output for smoother action
    framebuffer=$(
        clear
        tput cup "$y" "$x"
        tput setaf "$color"
        printf "%s" "$text"
    )

    # dump to screen
    printf "%s" "$framebuffer"
done

Paste shell script, get feedback: ShellCheck project update

tl;dr: ShellCheck is a bash/sh static analysis and linting tool. Paste a shell command or script on ShellCheck.net and get feedback about many common issues, both in scripts that currently fail and scripts that appear to work just fine.

There’s been a lot of progress since I first posted about it seven months ago. It has a new home on ShellCheck.net with a simplified and improved interface, and the parser has been significantly bugfixed so that parsing errors for correct code are now fairly rare.

However, the best thing is that it can detect a heaping bunch of new problems! This post mentions merely a subset of them.

 

Quiz: ShellCheck is aware of many common usage problems. Are you?

  • find . -name *.mp3
  • sudo echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
  • PS1='\e[0;32m\$\e[0m '
  • find . | grep "*.mp3"
  • [ $n > 7 ]
  • [[ $n > 7 ]]
  • tr 'A-Z' 'a-z'
  • cmd 2>&1 > log
  • array=(1, 2, 3)
  • echo $10
  • [[ $a=$b ]]
  • [[ $a = $b ]]
  • progress=$((i/total*100))
  • trap "echo \"Time used: $SECONDS\"" EXIT
  • find dir -exec cp {} /backup && rm {} \;
  • [[ $keep = [yY] ]] && mv file /backup || rm file

 
 
ShellCheck gives more helpful messages for many Bash syntax errors

Bash says ShellCheck points to the exact position and says
: command not found Literal carriage return. Run script through tr -d ‘\r’
unexpected token: `fi’ Can’t have empty then clauses (use ‘true’ as a no-op)
unexpected token `(‘ Shells are space sensitive. Use ‘< <(cmd)', not '<<(cmd)'
unexpected token `(‘ ‘(‘ is invalid here. Did you forget to escape it?
echo foo: command not found This is a &nbsp;. Delete it and retype as space.

 
 
ShellCheck suggests style improvements

Code ShellCheck suggestion
basename "$var" Use parameter expansion instead, such as ${var##*/}
ls | grep 'mp3$' Don’t use ls | grep. Use a glob or a for loop with a condition.
expr 3 + 2 Use $((..)), ${} or [[ ]] in place of antiquated expr.
cat foo | grep bar Useless cat. Consider ‘cmd < file | ..' or 'cmd file | ..' instead.
length=$(echo "$var" | wc -c") See if you can use ${#variable} instead

 
 
ShellCheck recognizes common but wrong attempts at doing things

Code ShellCheck tip
var$n=42 For indirection, use (associative) arrays or ‘read “var$n” <<< "value"'".
(Bash says “var3=42: command not found”)
${var$n} To expand via indirection, use name=”foo$n”; echo “${!name}”
(Bash says “bad substitution”. )
echo 'It\'s time' Are you trying to escape that single quote? echo ‘You’\”re doing it wrong’
(Bash says “unexpected end of file”)
[ grep a b ] Use ‘if cmd; then ..’ to check exit code, or ‘if [[ $(cmd) == .. ]]’ to check output
(Bash says “[: a: binary operator expected”)
var=grep a b To assign the output of a command, use var=$(cmd)
(Bash says “a: command not found”)

 
ShellCheck can help with POSIX sh compliance and bashisms

When a script is declared with #!/bin/sh, ShellCheck checks for POSIX sh compliance, much like checkbashisms.

 
ShellCheck is free software, and can be used online and locally

ShellCheck is of course Free Software, and has a cute cli frontend in addition to the primary online version.

 
ShellCheck wants your feedback and suggestions!
Does ShellCheck give you incorrect suggestions? Does it fail to parse your working code? Is there something it could have warned about, but didn’t? After pasting a script on ShellCheck.net, a tiny “submit feedback” link appears in the top right of the annotated script area. Click it to submit the code plus your comments, and I can take a look!

Making bash run DOS/Windows CRLF EOL scripts

If you for any reason use a Windows editor to write scripts, it can be annoying to remember to convert them and bash fails in mysterious ways when you don’t. Let’s just get rid of that problem once and for all:

cat > $'/bin/bash\r' << "EOF"
#!/usr/bin/env bash
script=$1
shift
exec bash <(tr -d '\r' < "$script") "$@"
EOF

This allows you to execute scripts with DOS/Windows \r\n line endings with ./yourscript (but it will fail if the script specifies parameters on the shebang, or if you run it with bash yourscript). It works because from a UNIX point of view, DOS/Windows files specify the interpretter as "bash^M", and we override that to clean the script and run bash on the result.

Of course, you can also replace the helpful exec bash part with echo "Run dos2unix on your file!" >&2 if you'd rather give your users a helpful reminder rather than compatibility or a crazy error.

ShellCheck: shell script analysis

Shell scripting is notoriously full of pitfalls, unintuitive behavior and poor error messages. Here are some things you might have experienced:

  • find -exec fails on commands that are perfectly valid
  • 0==1 is apparently true
  • Comparisons are always false, and write files while failing
  • Variable values are available inside loops, but reset afterwards
  • Looping over filenames with spaces fails, and quoting doesn’t help

 

ShellCheck is my latest project. It will check shell scripts for all of the above, and also tries to give helpful tips and suggestions for otherwise working ones. You can paste your script and have it checked it online, or you can downloaded it and run it locally.

Other things it checks for includes reading from and redirecting to a file in the same pipeline, useless uses of cat, apparent variable use that won’t expand, too much or too little quoting in [[ ]], not quoting globs passed to find, and instead of just saying “syntax error near unexpected token `fi'”, it points to the relevant if statement and suggests that you might be missing a ‘then’.

It’s still in the early stages, but has now reached the point where it can be useful. The online version has a feedback button (in the top right of your annotated script), so feel free to try it out and submit suggestions!

Why Bash is like that: Signal propagation

Bash can seem pretty random and weird at times, but most of what people see as quirks have very logical (if not very good) explanations behind them. This series of posts looks at some of them.

How do I simulate pressing Ctrl-C when running this in a script:

while true; do echo sleeping; sleep 30; done

Are you thinking “SIGINT, duh!”? Hold your horses!

I tried kill -INT pid, but it doesn’t work the same: Ctrl-C kills the sleep and the loop SIGINTing the shell does nothing (but only in scripts: see Errata)

SIGINTing sleep makes the loop continue with the next iteration

HOWEVER, if I run the script in the background and kill -INT %1 instead of kill -INT pid, THEN it works :O

Why does Ctrl-C terminate the loop, while SIGINT doesn’t?

Additionally, if I run the same loop with ping or top instead of sleep, Ctrl-C doesn’t terminate the loop either!

Yeah. Well… Yeah…

This behaviour is due to an often overlooked feature in UNIX: process groups. These are important for getting terminals and shells to work the way they do.

A process group is exactly what it sounds like: a group of processes. They have a leader, which is the process that created it using setpgrp(2). The leader’s pid is also the process group id. Child processes are in the same group as their parent by default.

Terminals keep track of the foreground process group (set by the shell using tcsetpgrp(3)). When receiving a Ctrl-C, they send the SIGINT to the entire foreground group. This means that all members of the group will receive SIGINT, not just the immediate process.

kill -INT %1 sends the signal to the job’s process group, not the backgrounded pid! This explains why it works like Ctrl-C.

You can do the same thing with kill -INT -pgrpid. Since the process group id is the same as the process group leader, you can kill the group by killing the pid with a minus in front.

But why do you have to kill both?

When the shell is interrupted, it will wait for the running command to exit. If this child’s status indicates it exited abnormally due to that signal, the shell cleans up, removes its signal handler, and kills itself again to trigger the OS default action (abnormal exit). Alternatively, it runs the script’s signal handler as set with trap, and continues.

If the shell is interrupted and the child’s status says it exited normally, then Bash assumes the child handled the signal and did something useful, so it continues executing. Ping and top both trap SIGINT and exit normally, which is why Ctrl-C doesn’t kill the loop when calling them.

This also explains why interrupting just the shell does nothing: the child exits normally, so the shell thinks the child handled the signal, though in reality it was never received.

Finally, if the shell isn’t interrupted and a child exits, Bash just carries on regardless of whether the signal died abnormally or not. This is why interrupting the sleep just continues with the loop.

In case one would like to handle such cases, Bash sets the exit code to 128+signal when the process exits abnormally, so interrupting sleep with SIGINT would give the exit code 130 (kill -l lists the signal values).

Bonus problem:

I have this C app, testpg:
int main() {
    setsid();
    return sleep(10);
}

I run bash -c './testpg' and press Ctrl-C. The app is killed. Shouldn't testpg be excluded from SIGINT, since it used setsid?

A quick strace unravels this mystery: with a single command to execute, bash execve’s it directly — a little optimization trick. Since the pid is the same and already had its own process group, creating a new one doesn’t have any effect.

This trick can’t be used if there are more commands, so bash -c './testpg; true' can’t be killed with Ctrl-C.

Errata:

Wait, I started a loop in one terminal and killed the shell in another. 
The loop exited!

Yes it did! This does not apply to interactive shells, which have different ways of handling signals. When job control is enabled (running interactively, or when running a script with bash -m), the shell will die when SIGINTed

Here’s the description from the bash source code, jobs.c:2429:

  /* Ignore interrupts while waiting for a job run without job control
     to finish.  We don't want the shell to exit if an interrupt is
     received, only if one of the jobs run is killed via SIGINT. 
   ...

Why Bash is like that: suid

Bash can seem pretty random and weird at times, but most of what people see as quirks have very logical (if not very good) explanations behind them. This series of posts looks at some of them.

Why can't bash scripts be SUID?

Bash scripts can’t run with the suid bit set. First of all, Linux doesn’t allow any scripts to be setuid, though some other OS do. Second, bash will detect being run as setuid, and immediately drop the privileges.

This is because shell script security is extremely dependent on the environment, much more so than regular C apps.

Take this script, for example, addmaildomain:

#!/bin/sh
[[ $1 ]] || { man -P cat $0; exit 1; } 

if grep -q "^$(whoami)\$" /etc/accesslist
then
    echo "$1" > /etc/mail/local-host-names
else
    echo "You don't have permissions to add hostnames"
fi

The intention is to allow users in /etc/accesslist to run addmaildomain example.com to write new names to local-host-names, the file which defines which domains sendmail should accept mail for.

Let’s imagine it runs as suid root. What can we do to abuse it?

We can start by setting the path:

echo "rm -rf /" > ~/hax/grep && chmod a+x ~/hax/grep
PATH=~/hax addmaildomain

Now the script will run our grep instead of the system grep, and we have full root access.

Let’s assume the author was aware of that, had set PATH=/bin:/usr/bin as the first line in the script. What can we do now?

We can override a library used by grep

gcc -shared -o libc.so.6 myEvilLib.c
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=. addmaildomain

When grep is invoked, it’ll link with our library and run our evil code.

Ok, so let’s say LD_LIBRARY_PATH is closed up.

If the shell is statically linked, we can set LD_TRACE_LOADED_OBJECTS=true. This will cause dynamically linked executables to print out a list of library dependencies and return true. This would cause our grep to always return true, subverting the test. The rest is builtin and wouldn’t be affected.

Even if the shell is statically compiled, all variables starting with LD_* will typically be stripped by the kernel for suid executables anyways.

There is a delay between the kernel starting the interpretter, and the interpretter opening the file. We can try to race it:

while true
do
    ln /usr/bin/addmaildomain foo
    nice -n 20 ./foo &
    echo 'rm -rf /' > foo
done

But let’s assume the OS uses a /dev/fd/* mechanism for passing a fd, instead of passing the file name.

We can rename the script to confuse the interpretter:

ln /usr/bin/addmaildomain ./-i
PATH=.
-i

Now we’ve created a link, which retains suid, and named it “-i”. When running it, the interpretter will run as “/bin/sh -i”, giving us an interactive shell.

So let’s assume we actually had “#!/bin/sh –” to prevent the script from being interpretted as an option.

If we don’t know how to use the command, it helpfully lists info from the man page for us. We can compile a C app that executes the script with “$0” containing “-P /hax/evil ls”, and then man will execute our evil program instead of cat.

So let’s say “$0” is quoted. We can still set MANOPT=-H/hax/evil.

Several of these attacks were based on the inclusion of ‘man’. Is this a particularly vulnerable command?

Perhaps a bit, but a whole lot of apps can be affected by the environment in more and less dramatic ways.

  • POSIXLY_CORRECT can make some apps fail or change their output
  • LANG/LC_ALL can thwart interpretation of output
  • LC_CTYPE and LC_COLLATE can modify string comparisons
  • Some apps rely on HOME and USER
  • Various runtimes have their own paths, like RUBY_PATH, LUA_PATH and PYTHONPATH
  • Many utilities have variables for adding default options, like RUBYOPT and MANOPT
  • Tools invoke EDITOR, VISUAL and PAGER under various circumstances

So yes, it’s better not to write suid shell scripts. Sudo is better than you at running commands safely.

Do remember that a script can invoke itself with sudo, if need be, for a simulated suid feel.

So wait, can’t perl scripts be suid?

They can indeed, but there the interpretter will run as the normal user and detect that the file is suid. It will then run a suid interpretter to deal with it.