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NAME

       runas — program to run daemons as non priviledge users

SYNOPSIS

       runas [-c location]  [uid]  [gid]  [program]

DESCRIPTION

       runas  is  a  small program that allows administrators a generic way to
       run daemons as non privileged users.

       runas is equivalent to using su     but it strips off  the  environment
       and does not require the target user’s shell to be legitimate (that is,
       listed under /etc/shells)

       The main reason of using runas is to avoid having daemons  run  as  the
       root  user, in some cases this might be necessary (like login programs,
       such as ssh or telnetd that need to  switch  to  the  user  making  the
       connection) but in many cases it might not be necessary at all.  It can
       be also a good replacement for su, since it prevents attacks to daemons
       through  the  use  of  environment  variables.  Just  change  (in  your
       initialisation scripts under /etc/init.d) the line:

              su - daemon -c /usr/bin/blah

       to:

              runas daemon daemongroup /usr/bin/blah

OPTIONS

       This program just takes two options:

       -?        Show summary of options.

       -c        Chroot the daemon to a specific location.

SEE ALSO

       chroot(2), chroot(8)

       The TITAN FAQ (link to URL http://www.trouble.org/titan/FAQ.html)

AUTHOR

       This  manual  page  was  written  by  Javier  Fernandez-Sanguino  Pen~a
       <jfs@computer.org>  for  the Debian system (but may be used by others).
       Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify  this  document
       under  the terms of the GNU General Public License, Version 2 any later
       version published by the Free Software Foundation.

       On Debian systems, the complete text of the GNU General Public  License
       can be found in /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL.

                                                                 TITANTOOLS(8)