sudo.
You could try looking at sudo (man sudo & man sudoers).
j
--- Neal Lippman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I am hoping someone can help me figure out to to properly handle file
> permissions. Let me outline
> the situation I am trying to set up.
>
> I have just gotten a HandSpring Visor, which connects via a USB port. (This
> is not a question on
> USB, or using JPilot, I already have all that stuff up and running. It really
>
> is a question about
> file permissions; I'm just using this as the concrete example because it is
> the situation prompting
> my question). The Visor connects for HotSyncing via /dev/ttyUSB1, which is
> owned by root and in
> group root; on my system the access privileges are rw-------.
>
> Obviously, I don't want to be root just to sync my PDA. For my Palm IIIxe on
> a serial connection to
> /dev/cua0, I just (for expediency) made myself (nl) the owner of that device,
>
> but I want to do a
> more proper job now for the Visor.
>
> What I did was to create a new group called visor on my system; I make it a
> system group:
> newgrp -r visor
> and then added myself (nl) to that group (or added that group to myself,
> depending on how you look
> at it...) and then gave group the appropriate access (chmod g+rw
> /dev/ttyUSB1).
>
> Here is where my problem lies. When I log in, I am of course UID nl and GID
> nl. If I newgrp visor,
> then of course my GID becomes visor and I can access the PDA just fine. This
> is inconvenient,
> however, because when I run JPilot or KPIlot under KDE, these programs will
> of course get my login
> GID (nl) but that won't do the job.
>
> I had originally thought, perhaps naively, that the way that file permissions
>
> worked is that if you
> are not the owner of a file, then if you had access to the group of the file
> you could access it
> via the group permissions, but it seems via my testing that only the current
> group (eg the EGID)
> seems to be looked at, not whatever groups you are allowed to change to via
> /etc/groups.
>
> The only solution that comes to mind so far is to create a shell script to
> "wrapper" JPilot:
> #! /bin/sh
> newgrp visor
> kpilot
> newgrp
>
> and change the link in KDE's menus to point to this script instead of
> directly to the kpilot
> program.
>
> I am wondering if I am missing something or if there is a more elegant
> solution that someone can
> help me out with.
>
> Thanks in advance.
>
> Neal
>
>
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