Turning a Dumb Shell Into a Real TTY

Tue, 09 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A raw reverse shell from a web exploit is a dumb shell. No tab completion, no arrow keys, no job control. It dies if you press Ctrl-C, and it cannot run an interactive program like su, ssh, or a text editor. Upgrade it to a full TTY before you do real work in it, because every minute spent in a dumb shell is a minute of typing full paths and losing the session to a stray keystroke.

Counting Your Shell History Can Execute It

Mon, 19 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A “top ten commands” script is about the most harmless thing you can write. In zsh, one common way to write it executes your history instead of counting it.

The problem

You want a count of your most-used commands. The obvious tool is an associative array keyed by the command line:

typeset -A counts
while read -r cmd; do
 (( counts[$cmd]++ ))
done < <(fc -ln 1)

This runs every history entry that contains a command substitution.

Shell on srdusr

Turning a Dumb Shell Into a Real TTY

Counting Your Shell History Can Execute It

The problem