Bug 958733

plexus-utils package is widely used (required by 96 packages in Fedora and it is the most often downloaded artifact on Maven Central [1]), so changing the API or migrating dependant packages to use standard JDK API would be difficult or impossible.

If I remember correctly the shell quoting code is indirectly used by maven-scm and maven-wagon.  Migration to ProcessBuilder is impossible (or at least not always possible) because the shell code needs to be executed on remote hosts (eg. over SSH) which is beyond capabilities of ProcessBuilder.

In my opinion the shell quoting and escaping code should be fixed to conform to appropriate standards, like [2].

[1] http://search.maven.org/#stats
[2] http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/7908799/xcu/chap2.html

Related to upstream bug PLXUTILS-161

I am one of the current maintainers of the plexus code in question. 

Plexus-utils is mostly used within maven, which (like all the build systems for java) is not a "safe" execution environment; if someone wants to inject an "rm -rf /*" into your build system there's probably thousands of different attack vectors to achieve this. This applies to all modern java build systems and is not a particular maven problem.

I am mostly trying to establish the actual severity of this issue;
we will gladly accept patches that update the correctness of the quoting algorithms (or if you can explain it to thickheads like me, I'll even fix it myself!). The code we're talking about here is ancient (and none of my doing) and just understanding the problem/consequences is hard enough.

A patch correcting the quoting algorithm (and avoiding its use where possible) has been attached to PLXUTILS-161.

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Fixed in plexus-utils-3.0.16-1

I believe that this bug is fixed in plexus-utils-3.0.16-1,
which is available in Fedora Rawhide, so I am closing this bug now.

The build containing the fix can be found at Koji:
http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=494089

This bug was fixed in the next release of Fedora, and is not planned
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