running as root and changing to user nobody programmatically
 

Hey all.

I'm writing a program that requires being run as root (for interfacing with network card) but during runtime it no longer requires it.

I'd like to setuid and setgid to the nobody user/group but don't know how to programmatically determine the UID/GID of the corresponding nobody user/group. I'm trying to avoid having the user enter the UID/GID as an additional parameter or adding it to a conf file (as it would be the only thing in the conf file).

Is there a way to determine a uid/gid for nobody without asking the user for it?

Thanks for any input on this!

Have a look at the source of getent, maybe?
$ getent passwd nobody
nobody:x:65534:65534:nobody:/nonexistent:/bin/sh



Cheers,
Tink

man getpwent

Wow getpwent is precisely what I needed! Thanks much guys. I hadn't even heard of this function before.

Neither - that's why I looked at getent's source ;}

I use getpwnam and getgrnam.
Kevin Barry