On Thu, Jan 2, 2025 at 7:23 AM Chet Ramey <chet.ramey@case.edu> wrote:

On 1/1/25 1:11 PM, Rik Farrow wrote:
> For example, the 3B2 I
> administered for a while in the late 80s had multiple accounts with rsh,
> the restricted shell, as the login shell. That was okay, unless you used su
> and then had access to a root shell.

That's an administrator problem. Part of setting up a restricted shell
environment is creating a directory of necessary binaries and setting
PATH appropriately.

Each of these special accounts did have a home directory with a .profile to set up the restricted environment, then run a shell script to perform some task as root. For example, logging in as 'backup' would run /user/backup/.profile and allow a non-privileged user to run a backup script as root.

But typing "su backup" produced a root-owner shell without restrictions. You need to type "su - " to run the account's .profile script.

Rik