userv 1.0.3 review

userv is a tool for system administrators, who often find themselves with a program running as one user which needs to be able to do

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 186K Developer: Ian Jackson

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userv is a tool for system administrators, who often find themselves with a program running as one user which needs to be able to do certain things as another user.

For example, my machine's news system needs to scan my users' newsrcs to ensure that the right newsgroups are fetched. Before userv that part of the news system had to run as root, and clumsily use `su'.

It can be also a component for application authors. For example, imagine a version of `cron' which didn't need to run as root, so that a security bug in cron would just mean that bad people could get cron jobs to run at the wrong times, rather than everyone on the system being able to break in completely. Imagine being able to do sophisticated mail filtering at delivery time without the mail transfer or delivery agents needing to be root.

What's New in This Release:
Count -continued lines properly in error message line numbers.
Fix lexing bugs with "-quoted strings and -continuation.
Fix interpretation of n etc. in "-quoted strings.
Fix bug which ignored erroneous read/write after ignore-fd/reject-fd.