Re: shutdown permission to users?

[Brian Nelson <nelson@bignachos.com>]

On Thu, Aug 16, 2001 at 10:37:51AM -0700, Paul Mackinney wrote:
> My solution was to put the following shell-script in ~/bin
> 
> #!/bin/sh
> # Paul Mackinney's shutdown script for users that know the
> # root password
> su -c 'shutdown -h now'
> 
> Now when I try to shutdown from my user account, I just get prompted for
> the root password and it halts. The cool part about this is that I
> invariably forget that I'm not root, this avoids those irritating error
> msgs. 
> 
> Excercises for the newbie: 
> 1. modify the script to support halt/restart arguments.
> 2. modify the script to incorporate the suggestion to have a user whose
> default shell is /bin/shutdown. This avoids using the root password, in
> case your terminal is insecure (telnet, etc.) Note that you might need
> to add a "/bin/shutdown" line to /etc/shells to make this work.

I don't mean to take away from your fun, but, as others suggested, the
sudo command is quite nice for this stuff.  With the proper setup in
/etc/sudoers, you could just use the commands with your normal user
account:

$ sudo halt
$ sudo reboot

And with the NOPASSWD setting, you could avoid exposing your root
password.

-- 
Brian Nelson <nelson@bignachos.com>