Re: Why do system users have shells?
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
On Monday 25 November 2002 9:34 pm, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 25, 2002 at 09:53:22PM +0100, Russell Coker wrote:
> > On Mon, 25 Nov 2002 20:39, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> > > On Mon, Nov 25, 2002 at 12:10:44PM -0700, James Hamilton wrote:
> > > > I'm curious why system users such as bin, sys, and nobody have
> > > > /bin/sh as a shell instead of a noshell program or /bin/false.
> > >
> > > [snip]
> > >
> > > Possibly because otherwise, you cannot run any shell scripts as that
> > > user. (This may also apply to more than shell scripts, but I'm not sure
> > > about that.)
> >
> > sudo, start-stop-daemon, su -s
> >
> > Why can't people read man pages before replying?
>
> [snip]
>
> But there are programs that don't use su -s. E.g., custom logins
> (non-anonymous) from wu-ftpd will fail if the login shell is set to
> /bin/false. This, of course, is probably a bug, but I suspect a lot of
> things will break if (some) system users have no shell.
>
I remember trying to set all(most/some) system accounts to /bin/false and the
only thing I noticed breaking was fetchmail. Of course there may have been
others, but fetchmail persuaded me to revert to /bin/sh.
Would it be worth filing a bug about this?
- --
David Pashley
david@davidpashley.com
Nihil curo de ista tua stulta superstitione.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.1 (GNU/Linux)
iD8DBQE94z2YYsCKa6wDNXYRAgesAJ4wSUV6Nc6SESWZC1ObDRvK27i18wCfXlAz
llLPDoAOcFxhhLA/4GI0f0k=
=bNH+
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
Reply to: