Re: 4.5.9 test failure: fail-2eperm

Jim Meyering <jim@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> For the time being, I've made the following change:
>
>       * tests/rm/fail-2eperm: Rather than simply using the first non-root
>       user name, make sure that the selected user name has a usable shell.

But then you might find a real user account; that user can interfere
with the tests by sending signals, or, depending on what the tests do,
possibly writing files in the test area.  Letting the installing user
specify which account to use is the only safe way; any programmatic
guess will be wrong some of the time.

>> I think the right way to do this sort of thing is to let the user
>> specify a username or UID to use for non-root tests.  Then you can
>> pass the UID directly to setuid() rather than using su, so you don't
>
> That'd work in the perl test scripts, but what about the
> bourne shell ones?

Make a simple wrapper program to do the setuid and then exec its
arguments.  It would be approximately equivalent to:
<URL:http://cr.yp.to/daemontools/setuidgid.html>


paul