On Thu, 5 Jan 2006, Eric Blake wrote: > According to Igor Peshansky on 1/5/2006 3:37 PM: > > Hi, > > > > 'su' used to be an executable that worked correctly from a SYSTEM-owned > > shell, but now it's a shell script that simply prints a "not supported" > > message. Is it possible to resurrect the old "su" executable (that > > perhaps prints the same message if run from a non-SYSTEM account)? > > Coreutils certainly builds an su executable, but the cygwin distro of su > has been a script since at least 5.2.1 when Corinna was the maintainer; I > only enhanced the script to be a little more useful.
Right. In fact, Googling for "sysbash" unearthed this message: <http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2004-10/msg00900.html> (though Corinna did miss the one use for "su" that I mention below -- that is, switching user context without a password if unable to start a service). > I'll see what I can do about getting the executable built and running, > but no promise on a timeline; Thanks, I appreciate it. There's not that much rush (I mean, after all, I can build it myself if an urgent need arises), but it would be nice to have. > is there any easy run-time test as to whether the current user is SYSTEM > and should try to perform user switching, vs. normal users to print a > warning message that su is relatively useless under cygwin/Windows > semantics? Well, you can either test for UID 18 (bad) or actually try switching the user's context and then checking that it succeeded (good). > Also, be aware that there has been talk (but so far, no action) on the > bug-coreutils list about dropping su from coreutils altogether, since > there are other open source implementations of su available in other > projects, and since it is so hard to maintain in a generic manner. Heh. Did they happen to mention exactly which projects have the su implementations? > > This was the only convenient command-line way I knew to test the > > behavior of passwordless user switching from a SYSTEM shell... I > > would also be happy with alternative means for doing that. > > I guess that means I will finally have to figure out how to set up my > own sysbash to also test this. Meanwhile, if you download the cygwin > coreutils src tarball, the su executable IS built, just not installed. I posted the original shortcut in <http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2004-08/msg01132.html>, but here's a new and improved version (with at least one bug fix): C:\cygwin\bin\bash.exe -c "at $(date +%H):$((10#$(date +%M) + 1)) /interactive 'c:\cygwin\bin\bash.exe' --login -i; S=$((60 - 10#$(date +%S))); while [ $S -ne 0 ]; do echo -ne 'Please wait '$S' seconds for the shell \r'; sleep 1; S=$(($S - 1)); done" I set the Window layout to 38x1, which gives me a nice countdown to when the SYSTEM shell will pop up (though due to various factors, the countdown sometimes lags behind slightly). HTH, Igor -- http://cs.nyu.edu/~pechtcha/ |\ _,,,---,,_ [EMAIL PROTECTED] | [EMAIL PROTECTED] ZZZzz /,`.-'`' -. ;-;;,_ Igor Peshansky, Ph.D. (name changed!) |,4- ) )-,_. ,\ ( `'-' old name: Igor Pechtchanski '---''(_/--' `-'\_) fL a.k.a JaguaR-R-R-r-r-r-.-.-. Meow! "Las! je suis sot... -Mais non, tu ne l'es pas, puisque tu t'en rends compte." "But no -- you are no fool; you call yourself a fool, there's proof enough in that!" -- Rostand, "Cyrano de Bergerac" -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/
