NAME

       runas — program to run daemons as non priviledge users

SYNOPSIS

       runas [-c directorio]  [uid]  [gid]  [umask]  [program]  [[options]]

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 command line options:

       -?        Show summary of options.

       -cdirectory
                 Chroot the daemon to a specific directory before execution.

SEE ALSO

       chroot(2), chroot(8)

AUTHOR

       This manual page was written by Javier Fernandez-Sanguino Pen~a <jfs@debian.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)