Re: Proposing libgnomesu for inclusion in Gnome 2.6

[Hongli Lai <h lai chello nl>]

Andrew Sobala wrote:

> What's the use cases for su-in-the-desktop? I would have thought that
> the big one would be a nautilus (or gnome-vfs) subprocess grabbing
> superuser rights to edit system files then dropping them again later.

As far as I know you can't fork() and then give the subprocess root 
privileges. All PAM apps are setuid roots, and lower their priviledges, 
not raise them.
All authentication systems call a setuid root executable to verify the 
password, then that executable lowers priviledge and exec() an executable.