in reply to writing to a user's directory

Beware he be dragons ;-) sudo and other methods for changing your effective uid (particularly in a script) are tres dangerous and open to exploits. I see the following issues: OK so those are the reasons that sudo are bad ;-) the best way is to look at what you want to do and sort that. If all you want to do it manipulate the .forward and .vacation.msg files then chgrp them to something nice, change the permission to give write permission for that group for those files. Ensure nobody is in that group and bingo!! This is still not nice but it is less not nice.
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Zigster