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anlity60

Member

Registered: 2018-11-14

Posts: 6

Security reason for removal of the doubleclick shell option in Thunar?

Hello, friends!

I recently found out that the only way to execute your shell scripts with double click, was to input a long sausage with random commands into your terminal. When inquiring about it, only a few people even knew the reason, and the only thing they cited was "security reason", and nothing more. I would really wish to know about this security reason, and whether this absolutely essential option was removed without good reason.

Inevitable rant:
All the other file managers can do it, why not Thunar? You can't just take out a piece of essential functionality, and pretend like it's all OK. It's not. Your product is missing a feature. Like if Photoshop was missing the lasso tool. I like to double click my shell scripts, and often, and don't have time to invoke them in the terminal like a caveman, and you are telling me I can't? What are you, my mommy? Protecting me from theoretical haxxors? If I want to take the risk, it is my prerogative to do so, and you have no business in "protecting me". If even having the option in properties puts users at risk, just invoke the password screen, but leave the option in place. I can't even imagine the thought process that led to this decision. The least you can do is try to explain why you did this, and why you think it is such a big deal that you would remove a great tool from your file manager?

Hoping to see the feature return real soon

ToZ

Administrator

From: Canada

Registered: 2011-06-02

Posts: 11,485

Re: Security reason for removal of the doubleclick shell option in Thunar?

Hello and welcome to the forums.

Please see the original request to add this restriction as it has some extra background information. And although it is only one command that needs to be run to re-enable the functionality and is documented here, I can appreciate that for some users this may not be intuitive. Since it doesn't look like this will be reverted (a recent bug report was marked as WONTFIX) perhaps a better option would be to request that an option is added to the preferences dialog that allows one enable/disable this functionality right in the GUI.

Also, please note that this is a user support forum. If you wish to discuss this with the developers a better avenue would be to use the xfce4-dev mailing list.

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anlity60

Member

Registered: 2018-11-14

Posts: 6

Re: Security reason for removal of the doubleclick shell option in Thunar?

Thanks for the info, and I have no issue with the default behavior being opening in a text editor, I think it is a valid point, since many scripts don't open the terminal so you can see what is being executed. I was under the impression that they literally took away the option in the properties to change the default behaviour to either text editor or execute. It just occurred to me that they may have never been an option in the properties (though it's hard to believe), and if that is the case, than I am in the wrong. But if there was an option there that could toggle the default behavior, and then got taken out for "reasons", then that is the part I don't get and take issue with. As far as I can tell, all the posts just talk about the default behavior, which isn't an issue, and not about the absence of a toggle, which is.

ToZ

Administrator

From: Canada

Registered: 2011-06-02

Posts: 11,485

Re: Security reason for removal of the doubleclick shell option in Thunar?

As far as I can tell, all the posts just talk about the default behavior, which isn't an issue, and not about the absence of a toggle, which is.

Feel free to create an enhancement request that asks for the option to be added to the preferences dialog. The Thunar developers are quite active and should respond quickly.

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