2010/3/12 Eric Blake <eblake@redhat.com>:
Common Unix practice is to prefer VISUAL over EDITOR, particularly if the editor of choice spawns a new window. Thus, it is also common to see settings like EDITOR='emacs -nw', with the expectation that the shell will parse this as an argument to 'emacs' and not try to invoke a file containing a space.
If a user puts junk in EDITOR, they deserve what they get (much more than virsh will misbehave); furthermore, sudo scrubs EDITOR by default. So the blind use of metacharacters in EDITOR should not be considered too much of a security issue.
* tools/virsh.c (editFile): Prefer VISUAL over EDITOR. Don't reject shell metacharacters in EDITOR. * tools/virsh.pod (edit, net-edit, ENVIRONMENT): Document VISUAL. ---
@@ -639,10 +639,15 @@ of C<virsh> The hypervisor to connect to by default. Set this to a URI, in the same format as accepted by the B<connect> option.
-=item EDITOR +=item VISUAL
The editor to use by the B<edit> and B<net-edit> options.
+=item EDITOR + +The editor to use by the B<edit> and B<net-edit> options, if C<VISUAL> +is not set. +
There is also a pool-edit and iface-edit command. ACK. Matthias