From: John Joyce <dangerwillrobinsondanger@...>
Date: 2008-02-03T00:37:06+09:00
Subject: Re: Temporarily dropping root access


On Feb 1, 2008, at 3:12 PM, Daniel Berger wrote:

>
>
> 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
>
Sure!
Many installers run as root, so often building with make would  
require sudo,
same can be for rake.
Anytime something needs to write to a directory not owned by the user.