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