On Wednesday 05 April 2006 15:43, Matt Hyclak wrote:
>On Wed, Apr 05, 2006 at 03:27:27PM -0400, Gene Heskett enlightened us:
>> But, from the way I mentally processed the path, and I did in a
>> message to Anne, /etc/profile specifically removes /usr/local/sbin
>> from the path if the user has a non-zero uid.  It did not do that
>> when I had added it to /home/amanda/.bash_profile because I'd thrown
>> some echo $PATH's into /etc/profile just to check, so when it
>> survived the "su - amanda", I was scratching my head.  Does that not
>> reset the root uid first to that of "amanda"?  But I've too sleepy
>> to trace that back for the second time today.
>
>On my system (CentOS 4), /etc/profile doesn't remove */sbin paths. It
> only adds them for UID 0:
>
># Path manipulation
>if [ `id -u` = 0 ]; then
>        pathmunge /sbin
>        pathmunge /usr/sbin
>        pathmunge /usr/local/sbin
>fi
>
>(pathmunge is a fancy way to add things to the path either before or
> after the existing path - consider it equivalent to PATH=$PATH:/sbin)
>
Ahh, I had the impression, obviously wrong, that it was able to strip an 
unwanted path from the users $PATH, and that was what it was doing.  I 
didn't see the == 0 there either, my bad.

Thanks for that clarification.

>One way to solve this would be to create a script in /etc/profiles.d/
> to do:
>
>if [ `id -un` = "amanda" ]; then
> PATH=$PATH:/path/to/amanda/executables
>fi
>
>You could modify that to do anyone in a certain group (disk, backup,
> etc.), or just stick it in .bash_profile :-)
>
>Matt

-- 
Cheers, Gene
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Copyright 2006 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.