The script runs a handful of root-owned commands and parses the output to gather information into a reporting system.

For my own sake I'd like to add some basic automated tests which make it simple to run this and other scripts as a non-root user, both for development purposes, and to have some regression tests in place.

It's code I currently control, so refactoring is an option, but I'd rather avoid refactoring something which works into something that imposes what may be perceived as pointless complexity on future custodians.

So, I was hoping for was a module someone had already written, or a simple trick, which could do this fairly transparently and effortlessly.

By the way, thanks for the suggestions so far, it's always educational to ask for help. I quite like the PATH idea, and overriding readpipe is in fact doable in the same way as it is for system, but a quick experiment suggests that it's not that easy to change the behaviour of backticks:

 $ perl -le 'BEGIN { *CORE::GLOBAL::readpipe = sub { print "hello $_[0
+]" } } readpipe "foo";  `bar` '
hello foo
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