So I recently downloaded Tor Browser on my Linux machine and what immediately caught my eye is the fact that after uncompressing the file (I think it was .tar.gz, but the question applies to every compression method) a .desktop file got generated in the extracted folder. Is this hidden functionality of .tar.gz and some code got executed which generated this so-called shortcut or is it just the OS that generated that file with a absolute path by on itself?
1 Answer
There are several slightly overlapping questions here:
can ... execute some custom code
This might be possible due to security bugs, even if it is not intended functionality.
is this hidden functionality of .tar.gz
No. This is generated by the OS
a ZIP/tar.gz/rar/etc file ...
As for ZIP, tar.gz and rar - these don't have this functionality. As for "etc" - maybe, when choosing the right value for "etc".
.desktop
file in.tar.xz
format already available. The contents were semi-scripted containing variable dirname. I could have sworn that I've seen my absolute path in the .desktop file in a previous version of Tor...