23.5 Security Note

External command and scripts are executed with the privileges of the user running Cows. If you run Cows on files created by others, you may allow them to do everything (this is not a Cows peculiarity: executing a program created by someone else is potentially dangerous).

You can create a new user so that possible problems will be limited to its home directory. Otherwise, you can use the -noext-warning and -noext-error flags for Cows (see Section 6.2). Both tell Cows to skip execution of external scripts and commands; if the former is used, Cows will raise a warning while with the latter will raise an error.

Remember that if you use Cows-mkgen, you can do the following:

cows-mkgen --cows-option="--noext-warning"

This will instruct Cows-mkgen to create a makefile which run Cows with the -noext-warning option (see Section 6.4).