Thread: [Announce] easyroot -- an even better way of becoming root
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ag2 is offline ag2
2008-01-07 , 20:59
Posts: 164 | Thanked: 132 times | Joined on Dec 2007
#4
Originally Posted by fanoush View Post
Even if it is better, it should stay 100% compatible with 'sudo gainroot'. Looks like you tried but still I would suggest to drop '-' after su from /usr/sbin/gainroot to make it more compatible with original version. You can add it to your new root script so it is still 'easy'. So root script would become "sudo gainroot -" and in original gainroot use something like "exec su $@". Using exec will avoid one sh process in calling stack (=save some memory). Same could be done in your new root script so together you will save two waiting shells (try it with ps, top or htop from SDK repository).
Hi fanoush,

I am not sure what you mean by 100% compatible with 'sudo gainroot'. The original 'sudo gainroot' had serious problems, so deviating from it was a design goal. Let me elaborate a bit more on what I think is wrong with the current 'sudo gainroot':

- (this seems to be a bug with busybox) After 'sudo gainroot', "~" still resolves to /home/user instead of /root. Similarly, if you type 'cd' with no arguments, you end up in /home/user.

- with /bin/sh, none of the startup scripts (.bashrc, .profile, etc) are sourced. So if you want to have a custom prompt for root, you can't.

- 'sudo gainroot' always starts in busybox's sorry-*** shell, even if I become root from bash.

- I wasn't very happy with tons of logging (7 lines?) when switching to root. If I need to copy-paste something, the extra logging pushes the interesting stuff above the fold.

'su -' in my version works around all of the above problems.

Also, please note that typing 'sudo gainroot' still works. 'root' is just a convenient shortcut. You can add 'alias root="sudo gainroot"' to your .bashrc to avoid the extra shell instance, though in practice I think the overhead of an extra shell is negligible.

I am not sure about your 'exec' suggestions. I would think a new shell would be started anyway for 'sudo gainroot' regardless of what I put in 'root', because it is 'gainroot' that starts a new shell (with #!/bin/sh). No?

Finally, the original 'sudo gainroot' starts a new shell too, so this script is no worse than the original if you invoke it with 'sudo gainroot'.

Thanks.