Vulnerability · Published Nov 4, 2026 · Assigned by harborist
CVE-2026-121749nvm passes the version pattern to grep without -e, letting a .nvmrc inject grep options and read local files
Low 3.3
In plain English
A low-severity argument injection in nvm from nvm-sh. There are no confirmed reports of exploitation so far. The chance it is exploited in the next 30 days is estimated at 0.2% (higher than 5% of all known vulnerabilities).
Official description
Node Version Manager (nvm) is a POSIX-compliant shell function for managing multiple node.js versions. In versions 0.5.0 through 0.40.8, the requested version pattern is passed to `grep` as a bare argument, without `-e`, in `nvm_ls_remote_index_tab`, `nvm_remote_version`, and `nvm_ls_cached`. A `.nvmrc` whose first line starts with `-`, such as `-Rohenpm_[A-Za-z0-9]*`, is parsed as grep options; with GNU grep, `-R` searches the current directory recursively (following symlinks) instead of the version list. On a bare `nvm install`, nvm then treats a matched string from those files as the version, prints it, and requests it from the configured mirror inside download URLs, so for example a repository containing a symlink to `../../.npmrc` can leak the user's npm token to the terminal and to the mirror's and any proxy's logs. The disclosure is read-only and limited to the characters `0-9A-Za-z._+-`. Version 0.41.0 passes every version pattern to grep with `-e`.
Affected products (as reported)
Weakness: CWE-88 · Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:L/I:N/A:N
References
- GHSA-xmxw-6r9w-89gc vendor-advisory
- Fix commit bce663e3 patch