Legally overriding permissions from shell scripts
Usenet Administrator
usenet at supernet.haus.com
Thu Oct 11 02:22:21 AEST 1990
I have written a shell script that handles automated file transfers between
users on our network. It works by a using issuing the command
% ship <to-user> <filelist>
The ship script then creates a "package" and sends it to a server program on
the destination machine.
The server program, recv, is invoked via a sendmail/smail alias. Recv accepts
as its input the package file. It then unpacks the file and leaves the
resultants in the to-user's $HOME and mails notifications to the sender and
receiver.
Or at least it should. I have discovered that some user's have the permissions
set on their $HOME so that recv can't perform the mv.
How can I override the user's permissions so that recv can write to the
directory? I *thought* that scripts run from sendmail/smail aliases ran as
root, and therefore this would be a non-problem. Obviously, I was wrong.
The current solution is to check the writability of the to-user's $HOME. If
recv can't write to it, then he leaves the files in a spool/directory from
which the user can copy them from. This is not a good solution, since some
of the end users of this program are not unix literate.
I hope this was clear enough.
Thanks.
--
System Administrator root at supernet.haus.com
Harris Adacom Corporation usenet at supernet.haus.com
Dallas, Tx uunet!iex!supernet!root
214/386-2356 uunet!iex!supernet!usenet
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