Perl and tainted data

[Megan]

Has anyone worked with the taint/untainting supported by Perl? I'm slogging the O'Reily's "Programming Perl", and am more than a bit lost. "Learning Perl" has nothing though. I'd like to find a reference book either devoted to this, or something with extensive coverage and full explanation, rather than 10pages of very advanced coverage..

[manunkind]

Megan,

Not one book out there really uses beginner terms when explaining this. I found a few pages on the net that do pretty good.

First, learn as much as you can about regexes. Most un-tainting is done by matching.

Second, read through <a href="http://gunther.web66.com/FAQS/taintmode.html" target="_blank">this page</a>. It's a pretty thorough FAQ on tainted data.

Third, A perl programmer should never write scripts for the net without reading through <a href="http://www.w3.org/Security/faq/" target="_blank">this page</a> by Lincoln D. Stein. Concentrate on the section called Safe Scripting in Perl.

[Megan]

ty! I'll work my way through that stuff tomorrow ( and the day after, and the day after that....&lt;g&gt;)