building an online judge to evaluate Python programs

[Jabba Laci]

> That last seems to me to be the biggie.  Several times in the past few
> years, people in this mailing list have tried to build a safe sandbox.
> And each one was a big failure, for a hacker of sufficient interest.
> Some of them were spectacular failures.
>
> If you have to be safe from your user, Python may be the wrong language
> to give them.

Well, the course is about Python and I want to test Python scripts...

I've heard about "chroot jail" but I never used it. Wikipedia says:

"A chroot on Unix operating systems is an operation that changes the
apparent root directory for the current running process and its
children. A program that is run in such a modified environment cannot
name (and therefore normally not access) files outside the designated
directory tree. The term "chroot" may refer to the chroot(2) system
call or the chroot(8) wrapper program. The modified environment is
called a "chroot jail"."

I guess it could be used for sandboxing.

Laszlo