Re: State of debianutils
On Wed, Jan 30, 2002 at 10:24:57AM -0500, Joey Hess wrote:
> christophe barb? wrote:
> > I use a script written by Francois Gouget called 'sux' which does as
> > 'su' but for free take care of the X authentification stuff.
>
> So do I, but I call mine ~joey/.xinitrc
>
> # This makes X work when I su to root.
> if [ -z "$XAUTHORITY" ]; then
> XAUTHORITY=$HOME/.Xauthority
> export XAUTHORITY
> fi
>
> A utility seems rather pointless.
The script is quite a bit more sophisticated; it can generate an untrusted
authentication cookie and passes it to the new user. This is useful when
su'ing to users other than root.
Personally, I think that this functionality belongs in /bin/su. I started
work on a patch to do it, but quit working on it when I found that xauth's
interface made it overcomplicated to do securely (I wanted to call out to
xauth because /bin/su shouldn't link with any X libraries, IMO).
Maybe I should revisit this approach...
--
- mdz
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