Yikes.

The UNIX sysadmin in me cringes at the thought of a CGI running as root. Especially if it's coded by someone who by his own admission is new to unix and perl.

I would have the CGI take the needed info from the user, then call an external script to actually add the user dirs and such. Do NOT make it suid root. Use a package such as scmd or sudo to execute the script itself, and make SURE that the data passed to the script is good, ie, check for anything other than letters & digits.

Remember...good system admins are conscientious, the great ones are paranoid.


-HaB


P.S. I can't find a link for scmd. It may be part of the ssh package, tho.

hword.

In reply to Re: How do I execute as root? by HaB
in thread How do I execute as root? by Kurious

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":



  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.