Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!world!bzs From: bzs@world.std.com (Barry Shein) Newsgroups: comp.unix.internals Subject: Re: Finding Passwords Message-ID: Date: 6 Oct 90 23:17:03 GMT References: <8685@mirsa.inria.fr> <12438:Oct223:00:3290@kramden.acf.nyu.edu> <651@puck.mrcu> <21948:Oct606:29:2890@kramden.acf.nyu.edu> <52347@brunix.UUCP> Sender: bzs@world.std.com (Barry Shein) Organization: The World Lines: 18 In-Reply-To: cgy@cs.brown.edu's message of 6 Oct 90 17:03:49 GMT >But why should >login be setuid? Seems to me it only really needs to be executed by >getty, which runs as root anyway. Flame me if I am completely confused. you're not completely confused, only a little :-) People run "login user" directly to re-login as another user, similar to using su but killing the previous environment. One good reason for doing this is you want the new environment and logging out/in would drop a modem connection, not uncommon. This gets around this (there are other possible situations, of course, but I figured I'd head off "give me one good reason why...") -- -Barry Shein Software Tool & Die | {xylogics,uunet}!world!bzs | bzs@world.std.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 617-739-0202 | Login: 617-739-WRLD