I was debugging a new procmail rule and noticed some strange information in the logfile. It ended up to be mkdir complaining that it could not create a directory because it existed. I found out that this was coming from a user's .cshrc file that had something like: if ( ! -r /home/user/TMPDIR ) then mkdir /home/user/TMPDIR endif The TMPDIR was there but it was with mode 0700 and owned by the user, so it was not readable by other users, so if another user was trying to execute the .cshrc file it would attempt to execute the mkdir command. The problem is this. Why is a user's .cshrc file being executed by another user? I put some debugging info in my account and found this: New shell invocation: PID=18443: id=<<uid=0(root) gid=6(mail)>> UID PID PPID C STIME TTY TIME CMD root 18440 1 0 15:01:52 ? 0:00 /usr/lib/sendmail -bd -q15m root 18441 18440 0 15:01:52 ? 0:00 procmail -f somebodyelse@xxxxxxxxxxx -Y -a -d mbarnes root 18442 18441 0 15:01:52 ? 0:00 procmail -f somebodyelse@xxxxxxxxxxx -Y -a -d mbarnes root 18443 18442 0 15:01:52 ? 0:00 /bin/zsh -c echo $ORGMAIL | sed s,$MAILDIR/,, mbarnes is me. The procmail command that invoked the shell as root but sourced my shell's dotfiles was this: DEST_USER=`echo $ORGMAIL | sed s,$MAILDIR/,,` The invocation of procmail is via sendmail.cf and it is called by: Mlocal, P=/usr/local/bin/procmail, F=ESAw5:|/@glDFMPhsfn, S=10/30, R=20/40, T=DNS/RFC822/X-Unix, A=procmail -Y -a $h -d $u Note the the '$h' appears to be an empty string or nonexstant alltogether, I havn't gotten any further at this time. I am by no means a sendmail or procmail expert, and I simply may have something misconfigured on my system, but at this time, at least for me, this is a local root exploit. Any comments? Mike -- /-----------------------------------------\ | Michael Barnes <mbarnes@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> | | UNIX Systems Administrator | | College of William and Mary | | Phone: (757) 879-3930 | \-----------------------------------------/