On Mon, Jul 13, 2009 at 10:48:35PM +0100, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
The same application could overwrite .bash_profile too. Or it would be very contrived to imagine a security hole that lets you create ~/bin and place an arbitrary binary into ~/bin/bash, but doesn't let you overwrite .bash_profile. So I don't think this is a security concern at all in the real world.
Realistically, the concern is more likely to be binaries accidently causing subtle breakage by colliding with the expected behaviour of system utilities.