The usual way to do something like this is to invoke the suid bit, which
allows aprogram to run under the uid of its owner rather then the uid of the
users who starts it. If the program can itself be set this way (not all can;
Perl, for instance, won't accept the suid bit), the command "chmod +s
program_name" will do the trick.
If the program in question cannot be suid'd itself, the usual trick is to
write a wrapper program in C that has the suid bit set and that does nothing
other than run the real program. The first edition of _Programming Perl_ has
an example of this in its "big examples" chapter.
At 09:17 AM 3/9/01 -0500, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>I have a little puzzle.
>
>User would like to start some backup software that must be run by
>root. This happens often enough so that it would be convenient to put
>a launcher in Gnome Panel's menu.
>
>I assume the answer is to create a string that will su itself to root
>by issuing the password, and then launch the application, but I've no
>idea how to design a string to do that (I'm aware of the security
>issue here).
--
------------------------------------"Never tell me the odds!"---
Ray Olszewski -- Han Solo
Palo Alto, CA [EMAIL PROTECTED]
----------------------------------------------------------------
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-newbie" in
the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Please read the FAQ at http://www.linux-learn.org/faqs
