From: Thomas Dickey <dickey@his.com>
To: Thomas Dickey <dickey@his.com>, 611487@bugs.debian.org
Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2011 05:47:46 -0500 (EST)
Subject: Re: Bug#611487: xterm: immediately exits upon running: exec login
USER
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On Wed, 2 Feb 2011, Thomas Dickey wrote:
On Sat, 29 Jan 2011, Jeffrey Sheinberg wrote:
This is a bug in xterm Version: 261-1 as I originally reported, please
see my above comments.
I can reproduce this difference without the utempter library
(though it's possible that the problem is related to ifdef's for
it). I'll look for a solution and close out #268 "soon" (have
been busy setting up new development machines).
hmm - my quick check "without" was also without setgid, so there was no
utmp entry.
Reading the source for login, I see that the error message comes
from a check (a) not running as root and (b) no valid utmp entry
found.
Given that, the likely explanation is that login is dropping the
setuid itself. I don't see that in the unpatched source, but see
comments in the Debian patch which indicate that's intended
behavior.
Looks like a possible workaround would be to use sudo or other
wrapper that holds the setuid behavior.