for everyone whose sick of sudo read this

[Stephen R Laniel]

On Thu, Jun 30, 2005 at 09:05:28AM +0500, Mustafa Abbasi wrote:
> ok so maybe root in gnome is not a ver good idea but is there anyway to
> temporarily give root
> access then soon as job is done take it away without having to relogin.

Well, that's what sudo does: it gives root access for the
duration of one command.

What are you trying to do? Why does this person need root
access? People almost never need root access. Quite often
people will perform a task as root because they're unsure
how to get it done as a regular user, but they just need to
be told the right way to do it.

For instance, before I knew better, I used to save files in
the root of my filesystem -- because I had come from the DOS
world, in which the directory structure means little. Under
Linux, the directory structure means quite a lot, and most
of the time you should never have to be root to do anything
in your home directory.

Although I suspect that you don't really need to be giving
other people root access, you could try a little compromise:
put the files you want under some specific group's ownership
-- say, the 'temp' group -- then put the other people in
that group. You'd do something like

sudo addgroup temp
sudo adduser [username] temp
sudo chown [username]:temp [filename]

where [filename] is the name of the file that you want to
give [username] access to.

But again, I'd urge you to make clear what it is you
actually intend to do; I'm sure we can find a way for you to
do it without root access.

-- 
Stephen R. Laniel
steve at laniels.org
+(617) 308-5571
http://laniels.org/
PGP key: http://laniels.org/slaniel.key
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