On 4 Jun, John Rye wrote:
>
>
> Hi all,
>
> I continue to find references to "suid"ing a file to make
> it useable..
>
> Hunt as I may I cannot find anything in man pages or in HOWTOs
> as to what this term means nor how to use it.
>
> Could someone please post an explaination and some examples of
> it's use.
>
Uhm... Hmmm... That's a pretty basic Unix question. You should look up any
decent Unix resource and read up on this: it'll explain it better than I
can.
Basically, suid means that the program runs as the owner of that said
program. It's usually used to give users more priviledges when running a
particular program. A prime example is sendmail:
-rwsr-sr-x 1 root root 63228 Jan 3 22:24 /usr/sbin/sendmail*
The "s" in the permissions mode says that sendmail is setuid root. This
means that any user running sendmail will run it as root, thus allowing that
user to access certain directories which he/she normally wouldn't have
access to.
In the case of sendmail, you will see that only root has the right to put
anything in /var/spool/mqueue, which is where the mail queue is located.
When you send mail with sendmail, sendmail will actually write data in that
directory on your behalf, by running as root.
You can also do the opposite: suid a program to restrict priviledges when it
is run but I haven't seen that much.
L
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