I normally use my slackware 9.0 box logged in as a normal user (ie; not root). I recently installed hping after executing an SU so that I could be the root user installing hping. I want to be able to use this program as a normally logged in user not root. However, the binary was installed in /usr/sbin thus making it available to root only. So I decided to create a symbolic link to this binary file from my /bin directory. Were there other methods I overlooked to accomplish the same thing? Any considerations?

Thank you and Regards

Just linking will not work (and it's ugly too), but how about sudo ?

As far as I know.. the only reason it wouldn't work is because normal users don't have "/usr/sbin" in their $PATH.

I know normal users can execute "ifconfig" if the sbin directory is in their $PATH

sudo is definaltly your answer here.

Well, first see if your user has permissions to execute it --

/sbin/hping

If it works, then you can move it to the /bin or /usr/bin directory to have it in everyone's path.
There's really no reason to symlink it, and no reason to restrict access to root. Sudo would be an option, but I don't see how it's necessary. Simply mv it from one to the other.

--Shade

I always add my default user to the 'wheel' group and then run visudo and give members of 'wheel' permission to run all commands(with or without password). You'll still have to give the full path in order to run stuff that's not in the users path, though. This is the easiest way to give yout own default user a little extra 'power' without having to run as root or 'sudo' each time.