NAME

       pkttyagent - Textual authentication helper

SYNOPSIS

       pkttyagent [--version] [--help]

       pkttyagent [--process { pid | pid,pid-start-time } | --system-bus-name busname]
                  [--notify-fd fd] [--fallback]

DESCRIPTION

       pkttyagent is used to start a textual authentication agent for the subject specified by
       either --process or --system-bus-name. If neither of these options are given, the parent
       process is used.

       To get notified when the authentication agent has been registered either listen to the
       Changed D-Bus signal or use --notify-fd to pass the number of a file descriptor that has
       been passed to the program. This file descriptor will then be closed when the
       authentication agent has been successfully registered.

       If --fallback is used, the textual authentication agent will not replace an existing
       authentication agent.

RETURN VALUE

       If the authentication agent could not be registered, pkttyagent exits with an exit code of
       127. Diagnostic messages are printed on standard error.

       If one or more of the options passed are malformed, pkttyagent exits with an exit code of
       126. If stdin is a tty, then this manual page is also shown.

       If the authentication agent was successfully registered, pkttyagent will keep running,
       interacting with the user as needed. When its services are no longer needed, the process
       can be killed.

NOTES

       Since process identifiers can be recycled, the caller should always use pid,pid-start-time
       when using the --process option. The value of pid-start-time can be determined by
       consulting e.g. the proc(5) file system depending on the operating system. If only pid is
       passed to the --process option, then pkttyagent will look up the start time itself but
       note that this may be racy.

AUTHOR

       Written by David Zeuthen <davidz@redhat.com> with a lot of help from many others.

BUGS

       Please send bug reports to either the distribution or the polkit-devel mailing list, see
       the link https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/polkit/polkit/-/issues/ on how to subscribe.

SEE ALSO

       polkit(8), polkitd(8), pkaction(1), pkcheck(1), pkexec(1)