in reply to How to run a perl script under "nobody" user?

You can use sudo to start a script under a different user (but you either need root powers, or sudo has to be configured to allow that).

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^2: How to run a perl script under "nobody" user?
by sunshine_august (Scribe) on Nov 19, 2008 at 10:23 UTC
    I try to do this, but faild:
    [root@localhost]# su - nobody -c "./foo.pl"
This account is currently not available.

    [download]
[reply]
[d/l]
      That's not a perl problem anymore, I'll try anyway...

      Probably the user nobody has the program /usr/sbin/nologin as its login shell, which prints the message you have quoted and then exits.

      Possible solutions are (1) use sudo as I suggested, not su (2) convince su not to spawn a login shell (no - in the command line) or (3) give the user nobody a different login shell.

[reply]
[d/l]
[select]

        What I really want is the script can run under "nobody" user like the Apache way.

        We usually start apache like this: 

        sudo /usr/local/apache2/bin/apachectl start

        [download]
        then, when we `ps aux | grep apache`, we can find that apache's user id is "nobody":
        root      1102  0.3  0.2   5972  2368 ?        Ss   18:35   0:00 /usr/
+local/apache2/bin/httpd -k start
root      1103  0.0  0.0   1620   300 ?        S    18:35   0:00 /usr/
+bin/cronolog /usr/local/apache2/logs/access_%Y-%m-%d-%H-%M.log
nobody     1109  0.0  0.1   5972  1496 ?        S    18:35   0:00 /usr
+/local/apache2/bin/httpd -k start
nobody     1110  0.0  0.1   5972  1496 ?        S    18:35   0:00 /usr
+/local/apache2/bin/httpd -k start
nobody     1111  0.0  0.1   5972  1496 ?        S    18:35   0:00 /usr
+/local/apache2/bin/httpd -k start
nobody     1112  0.0  0.1   5972  1496 ?        S    18:35   0:00 /usr
+/local/apache2/bin/httpd -k start
nobody     1113  0.0  0.1   5972  1496 ?        S    18:35   0:00 /usr
+/local/apache2/bin/httpd -k start

        [download]

        How can I make my perl script like this?
[reply]
[d/l]
[select]

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom