From: Paul Lutus <nospam@...>
Date: 2006-12-12T12:15:07+09:00
Subject: Re: UID/EUID subshell solutions

Luke Kanies wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I'm having inconsistent behaviour with running external commands as
> other users, and the time has apparently come to use something akin
> to a fork and popen3 to get something approximating consistent
> bahaviour.
> 
> I'm currently setting EUID and executing external commands, but some
> shells ignore that (which is apparently the "standard").

This is a very desirable shell behavior, to avoid an obvious hacker
vulnerability.

> 
> I need some solution that will allow me (when running as root) to run
> shell commands as another user and capture stdout and (hopefully)
> stderr.  This basically means fork and run Process.uid = blah, but
> there's some IPC to do too.
> 
> Is there a semi-standard pattern for doing this, or does someone have
> some simple example code I can use?

`su (username) -c (command)`

-- 
Paul Lutus
http://www.arachnoid.com