I need users in a certain group to be able to restart Qmail (after editing
files in /var/qmail/control). So far I have had a very frustrating time with
this.

It seems that the only way Qmail will start is with the exact syntax
provided in the documentation -

  csh -cf 'qmail-start ./Mailbox splogger qmail &'

Nothing else that I've tried will work, and I must admit I don't understand
why.

So anyway, I can't just stick that in a shell script and +s it because Linux
doesn't allow suid scripts. I can't put it in a Perl program because no
combination of permissions would please csh. The only way I managed to get
it to work at all was to write a C program that setuid(0) then called that
does this with system(). The problem with that is, when the Perl program
finishes, Qmail dies with it. If I run my C program from the command line,
Qmail is happy forever.

How would I detach Qmail from any dependency on the Perl script, OR, is
there a better way to do this whole thing?

Thanks very much for any ideas.

miguel

And why should you want to start it in an undocumented way? :-)

Good for Linux!

Naaaaah. Perl can do it! If nothing else, you can pass those args to csh,
and let it start qmail.

Why not do is from a set-id Perl program? (Read perlsec, though.) You'll
probably want to use fork-and-exec, rather that system. Hope this helps!

--
Tom Phoenix       Perl Training and Hacking       Esperanto
Randal Schwartz Case:     http://www.rahul.net/jeffrey/ovs/