Thread: [Announce] easyroot -- an even better way of becoming root
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fanoush is offline fanoush
2008-01-07 , 21:41
Posts: 2,152 | Thanked: 1,490 times | Joined on Jan 2006 @ Czech Republic
#5
'sudo gainroot' does not change current directory, does not read .<whatever>rc (and thus does not mess environment variables in unknown way) etc. and is here for more than 2 years. If you want something better/easier/incompatible with this, you (IMO) should put it to your 'root' shortcut so the old way (=running sudo gainroot) still works in same way. Especially if you force people to chose either becomeroot or your package. Design goal of breaking compatibility doesn't look like good goal to me.

One example of compatibility is launching sudo gainroot from scripts to relaunch itself as root like this
Code:
#!/bin/sh
if [ `id -u` != 0 ] ; then
#if not already root, call itself as root
        exec sudo gainroot <<EOF
exec $0 $*
EOF
        exit $?
fi
#real script follows
echo "I am `id`"
echo "current dir is `pwd`"
I am using it a lot in my scripts and over time lot of people may use it too for various quick hacks. It is simple way that allows you to run code as root from scripts without touching /etc/sudoers. Your change of /usr/sbin/gainroot may break such scripts that don't expect things like current working directory or other variables to change.

as for using exec - this is really small thing but as I said try to see with htop what happens when you launch your 'root' script an how many different processes (mainly shells) are spawned, kept in memory and wait for its child to exit. Exec call replaces current process so this does not happen.
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Last edited by fanoush; 2008-01-07 at 21:48.
 

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