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Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2003 14:37:29 -0500
From: Dan Nelson <dnelson@allantgroup.com>
To: Ryan Thompson <ryan@sasknow.com>
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In the last episode (Jul 22), Ryan Thompson said:
> If you *really* want to have suid scripts, your binary wrapper idea is
> quite a common trick. Don't get fancy with it, though. A one-liner to
> execve(2) should really be all you need. Either that, or re-code the
> whole thing in C (or some other compiled language). C can introduce
> insecurities of its own, but at least you'd (arguably) have put them
> there yourself. :-)

I use sudo for stuff like this.  I add a line like this in sudoers:

ALL             ALL = NOPASSWD: /usr/local/bin/thescript

and put this it the top of thescript:

#! /bin/sh
if [ $(id -u) -ne 0 ] ; then
  if [ "$TRYINGSUDO" = "1" ] ; then
    echo "Cannot get admin priviledges!  Exiting"
    exit 1
  else
    export TRYINGSUDO=1
    exec sudo $0 "$@"
  fi
fi

-- 
	Dan Nelson
	dnelson@allantgroup.com