I'm working in SUSE 11 in an environment where unformatted USB drives will be plugged in and I want a non-rooot user to be able to format them via mkfs. I couldn't find any settings that allowed non-root to run mkfs (if there is such a setting or a group the user can be added to, please let me know). So, the way I was going to do this was to set up the sudo configuration to allow all users to run "sudo mkfs". This works fine, except that since this is run as root, they don't have permissions to write to the newly-formatted drive.

Is there an option in mkfs to set the initial ownership of the root of the new file system? Specifically, I'd like to just have the non-root user own it. I know I can just do a chmod/chown to set the permissions appropriately but since a non-root user will be doing the mkfs, this won't work. The only other solution I've come up with is to write a shell-script which does the mkfs followed by a chown and set up the sudo configuration to allow all users to run this. It seems like this will work, but I was hoping there was a cleaner solution.

Also, I was wondering if there was a C function call which did the equivalent of a mkfs. I couldn't find anything searching the man pages (though I assume I'd still have similar permissions issues as a non-root user wouldn't be allowed to call the function successfully).

Thanks.
adam

did you try using sudo and is sudo setup on the account with proper permissions?