Allowlisting some Bash commands is often the same as allowlisting all

by drewgregoryon 1/28/2026, 7:37 PMwith 25 comments

by sadnboxxon 1/28/2026, 8:52 PM

Allowing a "command" (executable, I believe) that isn't a read-only absolute path is a fool's errand. I will modify PATH and run my own implementation of it.

by eqvinoxon 1/28/2026, 9:29 PM

everything is a container these days, and yet somehow collective-we don't manage to have AI agents run in a container layer on top of our current work, so we can later commit or rollback?

by zufallsheldon 1/28/2026, 8:43 PM

Same thing for allowing specific sudo-commands. Many tools (like vim or the tools mentioned in the article) would have the same problem when allowing them to be run with root privileges.

by totetsuon 2/2/2026, 8:04 AM

I remember when I was starting out, someone on my team showed me, that in the case where we were allowed to run vi and root on a machine there was noting stopping one from just starting a child shell from within vi with root privileges.

by AllegedAlecon 2/2/2026, 10:35 AM

Not entirely related to the content but man 'allowlisting' reads so badly. We should just out of ease of reading return to whitelisting.

by withon 2/2/2026, 2:28 AM

True, you can do almost anything if find is allowlisted.

find / -exec sh -c 'whatever u wanna do' \;

by pimlottcon 1/28/2026, 9:15 PM

I know they’re just being through but the “go test” part is a bit “Pray, Mr Babbage”… Test code is just code. I know of no language where tests are sandboxed in any meaningful way.

by hbogerton 1/28/2026, 10:40 PM

> I really thought `eval` would not be abused on non validated input

    - your colleague, or you 1 year before.

by bandramion 2/2/2026, 5:47 AM

I'm sorry but the idea of giving an AI agent a non-restricted shell is insane. If you don't want it to perform certain commands those commands should not be in its environment at all.

by teddyhon 1/28/2026, 8:38 PM

“…with Claude Code”