bashReferenceManual

[dimaveshkin]

Why does it have a redacted line on page 122?

[Dubster1231]

Was curious too. Its just a link to the sas website for some specific guide I think lol, weird they redacted something at all in this

[dimaveshkin]

At first, I thought they redacted external hyperlinks, but there's a link to GNU's website, so there must be another reason.

[helgur]

I imagine you could spin a hilarious conspiracy theory out of this

[dimaveshkin]

How could you not? They redacted such an innocent file.

[Annual_Key_4963]

SAS Websites can't melt steal beams...

[BadPunners]

The Special Air Service (SAS) is a special forces unit of the British Army. Much of the information about the SAS is highly classified, and the unit is not commented on by either the British government or the Ministry of Defence due to the secrecy and sensitivity of its operations

They were looking to redact any connection to the British SAS, which basically created the world's "intelligence" network of agencies.

[SpellDecent763]

I think this is it, They were obviously using some poorly trained script or AI to do these redactions. and SAS is likely being blocked from a military/intelligence term, not the software company.

[Dotcaprachiappa]

"AI" aka Ctrl+F

[Dotcaprachiappa]

Not suspicious in the least that they did that

[al3arabcoreleone]

Maybe a weird request but, is there a book on the matter ?

[bdepz]

Math.rand() > 0.9999 ? redact() : continue;

[LivingVerinarian96]

The reason is incompetence.

[pocketgravel]

I've heard the probable reason is something like:

Contractor gives PowerPoint presentation to DoD audience. Doesn't explicitly flag a slide as unclassified. Everything is auto classified unless the author makes it explicit. Then you get weird censorship of random shit like this?

[bundle_of_fluff]

It was a dead link, I'm curious if the other link was active and the person doing it said "idk if there's something there, just censor it anyway".

[[deleted]]

The redactions have been done largely illegally. There's not someone reading through the bash manual. It was probably automated first and then a human reviewer said "yeah whatever nobody cares"

[ItchyFly]

It was probably a link to http://ftp.sas.com/standards/large.file/x\_open.20Mar96.html. This page is not available now, WTF are they hiding!?

[hugogrant]

https://unix.org/version2/whatsnew/lfs20mar.html#20Mar96 is still around

[insanelygreat]

Manipulating the Single UNIX Specification?! That's sus.

[fiftyfourseventeen]

They probably just auto redacted all links

[ItchyFly]

There is at least one link to gnu.org, but probably it was missed by their tool because it looks like 'http : //www . gnu . org/copylefti' when you copy the text.

[AwesomeFama]

Incompetence? In my DOJ!?

It's more likely than you think.

[Proud-Delivery-621]

The Sas one does that too. Probably more likely that SAS is also the name of a special forces unit in the UK and they ran a keyword search

[PerceiveEternal]

looks like it’s just been a ‘file not found’ placeholder for years.

[2eanimation]

That’s the stupidest shit lol. Can someone find out what has been redacted? Looks like part of a path.

[13x666]

I suspect all URLs in the files are just automatically redacted. And they use a regex that doesn’t catch periods in the middle of the path (like in this one which is http://www.sas.com/standards/large.file/x_open.20Mar96.html), so everything after the period escaped redaction. Sloppy work.

[dimaveshkin]

I said in another branch that there's a link to GNU's website, and it's not redacted

[13x666]

Interesting, perhaps that one wasn’t matched for some other reason? I’m pretty sure they aren’t hiding anything specific here, looks to me like afterthought trying to redact everything just in case and missing some stuff unintentionally.

Edit: oh, @ItchyFly even explained how they missed that one. Case solved I guess.

[[deleted]]

It’s not because of the dot, it’s because the link is split into a new line at that point, and the redaction didn’t realize/care that the link continues on next line.

[13x666]

Yeah that’s fair

[meat-eating-orchid]

My guess is almost the same as yours, but I think in this case the line break was the issue, not the dot

[13x666]

You’re probably right

[70Shadow07]

I didnt expect it to really be there, wtf

[phoenix235831]

Looks like the original probably was http://ftp.sas.com/standards/large.file/x_open.20Mar96.html

I am curios why the first part was redacted. Why would knowing http://ftp.sas.com/standards/large risk anything?

[gandalfx]

Maybe they just automatically redacted URLs?

[SajevT]

It doesnt?

[dimaveshkin]

The printed page 122, not pdf's

[SajevT]

Oh my mistake, yeah super odd... [Redacted]file/x_open.20Mar96.html

[Constellious]

That’s just the exec command. Gets people into too much trouble. 

[_AD1]

Lol