Securing the Pyton Interpreter?

[Vinoo Vasudevan]

Stephen VanDahm <usenet at fomps.net> wrote in message news:<slrnbh7q3f.kiv.usenet at norge.freeshell.org>...
> I'm looking for a way to install Python on a UNIX machine in a way such 
> that any user on the system can use it, but only to execute scripts that 
> are located in a certain directory.  I do not have root access on the
> machine that will be running Python, so my options are limited.  I thought 
> about hacking the Python interpreter itself so that it will examine the 
> argument array and exit with an error if the script to be executed isn't 
> in the appropriate directory, but this seems pretty risky.  The module 
> 'site.py' is imported automatically upon initialization -- I've thought of 
> adding the check there instead.  I don't think either of these solutions 
> are very elegant.  Is there a better way?
> 
> Thanks for your time,
> 
> Steve VanDahm
> vandahm at norge.freeshell.org

Hi,
 Hacking the interpreter seems like overkill. Why not just set up a
shell script containing the names of the allowed python scripts, and
execute it from there.
for example:

#!/usr/bin/sh

if "$1" in myscript1.py myscript2.py ....;
then
 . /usr/bin/env python "$1"
else
  echo "You can't execute that script."
fi

My shell scripting is a little rusty so there may be some errors, but
I hope you get the general idea.

Hope it's useful,

Vinoo