RE: Super User Launcher

[Matt Agler <matagl sypher com>]

On Wed, 17 Mar 1999, Gleef wrote:
> On Tue, 16 Mar 1999, Vincent Harvey wrote:
> 
> > With this method, I could avoid the terminal (silly, but the
> > terminal might scare new users, and opening a terminal just to
> > launch an app can get annoying), and keep my themes consistent with
> > the rest of the desktop. Also, I was thinking one way around this
> > could just be to link the user's ~./gnome directory into the /root
> > directory, but this would not allow multiple priveleged users.
> 
> That's an interesting question.  I'm not sure how you would pass the
> settings over a gnome-run command.  

I notice that there is also the mini-commander applet.  It has a
macro-like setup where an expansion is being performed before the command
is executed.  How about adding a "root password" tag that expands to the
root password.  Then the mini-commander could prompt for the password when
it needs it.  If it never needs it, it never prompts.  Once it's prompted
it wouldn't need to reprompt for the session (not sure about this one).

Regardless, you would then only need the smallest program to take the
password as a parameter, grab the priviledges and execute.  It could look
like: gsu <passwd> prog parms...

Better yet, gsu could take the passwd on the stdin, then fixup stdin for
the prog before executing it.  That way you could avoid seeing the
password on the process list.

-Matt