how do i give a user account more power?

maniac matt · 12-21-2007, 10:08 PM

I was wondering if there was anyway to give a user account more "power", and by power i mean more ability per say.

Basically i was wondering if there is anyway to give a user account the ability to edit a file such as the Blacklist file.

-Matt

duryodhan · 12-21-2007, 10:39 PM

you need to add the user to relevant groups. for e.g,
/dev/sda is owned by root in group disks. and the perms on the file say that group users have same perms as owner. Thus if you are in the disks group you can edit the file the same way root can.

Check out the ls -l output on the relevant file you want to edit.

Additionally read the man pages on groups and chmod , chown etc.

gnashley · 12-22-2007, 01:23 AM

If you want to really give a user power to do most things, you can add the user to the wheel group and then run visudo and uncomment the line for the wheel group which gives memebers permission to run any command -with or without password. I often do this for myself to avoid having to use su and sudo. Note that this still won't give the user all rights -files which have the sticky bit set and belong to root still can't be removed by such a user.

evilDagmar · 12-23-2007, 05:15 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by maniac matt

I was wondering if there was anyway to give a user account more "power", and by power i mean more ability per say.

Basically i was wondering if there is anyway to give a user account the ability to edit a file such as the Blacklist file.

Create a new group called 'blackies'.
Make the user a member of this group.
chgrp blackies /etc/blacklist_file
chmod g+rw /etc/blacklist_file
Done.