From: Daniel Berger <djberg96@...>
Date: 2008-02-02T06:12:18+09:00
Subject: Re: Temporarily dropping root access



On Feb 1, 1:05 pm, MenTaLguY <men...@rydia.net> wrote:
> On Sat, 2 Feb 2008 04:23:02 +0900, Daniel Berger <djber...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hi all,
>
> > Say I've got a C extension with two rake tasks - 'build' and
> > 'install'. For the build task, if currently being run as root, I would
> > like it to drop down to, say, the 'nobody' user. Obviously, I'm only
> > talking about Unix here.
>
> Generally speaking, you should be able to use setreuid to set the
> effective UID to 'nobody' while keeping the real UID as root.
>
> (Actually 'nobody' may not be a good choice depending on the Unix
> flavor; I believe it is something of a special case on HP-UX for
> example)

Oh, and just curious, is there ever a time when you *would* want to
build as root?

Thanks,

Dan