From: utzoo!decvax!duke!harpo!floyd!trb
Newsgroups: net.unix-wizards
Title: Re: su and suid compared
Article-I.D.: floyd.417
Posted: Tue Aug  3 10:26:41 1982
Received: Wed Aug  4 03:05:11 1982


My goodness, talk about fanaticism!  This argument about becoming
setuid root sound like a pro life/pro choice debate or some other such
holy war.

What are we looking at?  A way to change the state of a process to
allow it access to privileged functions.  No more.  Sounds to me like a
job for a very simple system call, no more complicated than one which
would poke the lights, back in the good old days when consoles HAD lights.

It seems ridiculous to me that there isn't a quick and easy way to read
and change all the non-volatile table information in the u and proc
structures, in the whole operating system, that a user should have
access to.  Why does a ps have to take years to execute?  Why should it
be so painstaking to change a process uid?  Dennis Ritchie was gagging
about how kludgey the new code must look.  He should be complaining
about the data structures and their inaccessibility, not at our
attempts to deal with them in the cleanest possible way under the
circumstances.

The outcry is such that I feel I must be missing a point somewhere. Would
someone be so kind as to explain it to me?  (And please type slowly.)
	Andy Tannenbaum   Bell Labs  Whippany, NJ   (201) 386-6491