NAME
calife - becomes root (or another user)
legally.
SYNOPSIS
calife [file ... ] [login ]
or
... [file ... ] [login ] for some sites (check
with your administrator).
DESCRIPTION
Calife requests user's own
password for becoming login (or root if no login is
provided), and switches to that user and group ID after verifying
proper rights to do so. A shell is then executed. If calife
is executed by root, no password is requested and a shell with the
appropriate user ID is executed.
The invoked shell is the user's own except when a shell is
specified in the configuration file calife.auth
If ``-'' is specified on the command line, user's profile
files are read as if it was a login shell.
This is not the traditional behavior of su
Only users specified in calife.auth can use calife
to become another one with this method.
You can specify in the calife.auth file the list of
logins allowed for users when using calife See calife.auth5
for more details.
calife.auth is installed as /etc/calife.auth
FILES
- /etc/calife.auth
- List of users authorized to use calife and the users
they can become.
- /etc/calife.out
- This script is executed just after getting out of
calife
SEE ALSO
su(1),
calife.auth5, group(5),
environ(7)
ENVIRONMENT
The original environment is kept. This is
not a security problem as you have to be yourself at login
(i.e. it does not have the same security implications as in
su(1)).
Environment variables used by calife
- HOME
- Default home directory of real user ID.
- PATH
- Default search path of real user ID unless modified as
specified above.
- TERM
- Provides terminal type which may be retained for the
substituted user ID.
- USER
- The user ID is always the effective ID (the target user ID)
after an su unless the user ID is 0 (root).
BUGS
Versions older than 2.7.1 do not support the
MD5-based scheme used in the international version of FreeBSD. Use
the non-US based crypt(3)
library. You may find it here <URL:ftp://braae.ru.ac.za/pub/FreeBSD/securedist>
The MD5-based crypt(3)
function is slower and probably stronger than the DES-based one but
it is usable only among FreeBSD 2.0+ systems.
HISTORY
A calife command appeared in DG/UX, written
for Antenne 2 in 1991. It has evolved considerably since this
period with more OS support, user lists handling and improved
logging.
AUTHOR
Ollivier Robert <roberto@keltia.frmug.fr.net>