From: Mark Hubbart <discord@...>
Date: 2004-02-06T16:55:52+09:00
Subject: Re: impersonating ruby

On Feb 5, 2004, at 3:35 PM, Robert K. wrote:

> Hi,
> can I somehow change a ruby interpreters uid from 0 to something and 
> then back again?
I may be wrong, but I think you can't do this in pure ruby. You'll need 
outside utils of some sort.

> I intend to write a little program, wich traverses all users dirs and 
> 'executes' whatever a user has written in his conf-file but in the 
> context of the corresponding user.
>
> What is the ruby mehtod to accomplish that?
>
> Reinvoking my script?

I would do something like this:

if Process.uid == 0
	# find each conf file and run this with
	# it's associated filename and username:
	`sudo -u #{username} #{File.expand_path $0} #{filename}`
else # it's not root; the you need to parse the conf file
	# get the filename
	filename = ARGV.unshift
	# process the file...
end

This is, of course, assuming that you are on a *nix based system.

cheers,
mark