NAME
calife - becomes root (or another user) legally.
SYNOPSIS
calife [-] [login]
or
... [-] [login] for some sites (check with your administrator).
DESCRIPTION
Calife requests users own password for becoming login (or root, if no
login is provided), and switches to that user and group ID after
verifying proper rights to do so. A shell is then executed. If calife
is executed by root, no password is requested and a shell with the
appropriate user ID is executed.
The invoked shell is the user’s own except when a shell is specified in
the configuration file calife.auth.
If ‘‘-’’ is specified on the command line, user’s profile files are read
as if it was a login shell.
This is not the traditional behavior of su.
Only users specified in calife.auth can use calife to become another one
with this method.
You can specify in the calife.auth file the list of logins allowed for
users when using calife. See calife.auth(5) for more details.
calife.auth is installed as /etc/calife.auth.
FILES
/etc/calife.auth List of users authorized to use calife and the users
they can become.
/etc/calife.out This script is executed just after getting out of
calife.
SEE ALSO
su(1), calife.auth(5), group(5), environ(7)
ENVIRONMENT
The original environment is kept. This is not a security problem as you
have to be yourself at login (i.e. it does not have the same security
implications as in su(1) ).
Environment variables used by calife:
HOME Default home directory of real user ID.
PATH Default search path of real user ID unless modified as specified
above.
TERM Provides terminal type which may be retained for the substituted
user ID.
USER The user ID is always the effective ID (the target user ID) after
an su unless the user ID is 0 (root).
BUGS
The MD5-based crypt(3) function is slower and probably stronger than the
DES-based one but it is usable only among FreeBSD 2.0+ systems.
HISTORY
A calife command appeared in DG/UX, written for Antenne 2 in 1991. It has
evolved considerably since this period with more OS support, user lists
handling and improved logging.
PAM support was introduced in 2005 to port it to MacOS X variants
(Panther and up).
AUTHOR
Ollivier Robert <roberto@keltia.freenix.fr>