The Unix approach would be to just die if you are not root (if you are sure you need to be root!) and let the user call su or sudo himself (or the script that is calling your perlscript). You might like su, others don't. (If you are not sure, just go ahead and let the program die when it encounters missing privileges.)

Windows has a very different concept of users, so of course you won't be able to find a single solution that works for Windows and Unix. For Win95/Win98, you can do whatever you want without changing user. For WinNT/Win2K/WinXP, things are more complicated. I don't think there's a solution for WinNT. For Win2K and WinXP, programs can be executed under different privileges. I don't know how accessible the interface is. It *might* be possible, check CPAN (I didn't see anything, but I just shot a quick glance). But it is definitely more effort than just changing a variable.

Again, the most straightforward solution is to let the user log in as supervisor, then execute the script.

UpdateTake a look at Re: Running Perl program w/root privs via cron. It could help you to not have to enter a password for Unix (using sudo).