UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi all,

Ok, bear with me on this one, I am a bit new to Unix and it might take me a little bit of time to articulate my question.

I know that every process has a user id and an effective user id. This seems to include the shell itself, because when I type 'ps', I see 'bash' listed as a process, and if I select the right options I can see that the uid and euid of 'bash' match my own uid.

user@tux:~$ ps -o "uid euid cmd"
UID EUID CMD
1000 1000 bash
1000 1000 ps -o uid euid cmd
user@tux:~$

I also know that you can user the 'su' command/script to create a new child shell with a different 'user' to the parent shell. Both the uid and euid of the new shell will be different to the old shell.

My question is, simply: is there any way of changing the effective user id of the shell you are in, instead of creating a subshell?
My (unlearned) gut feeling is that this should be possible, because I can write a 'C' program that changes its own euid 'on the run', and since c programs and shells are both processes, why shouldn't a shell be able to change its own euid (following a command from the user)?
I note that c's 'seteuid' function is called a 'system call', shouldn't it be even easier/more straightforward to make system calls straight from the shell?

Thanks in advance for any answers.

My reason for asking this question simply to deepen my understanding of unix.

The guy that wrote the shell determines what system calls it invokes. It would be possible for the shell's author to give the shell's user access to any system call. Perl pretty much does this, but perl is not exactly a shell. But even if you wrote your own C program, you can't just change the euid of your own process... that would be terrible for security. The system calls that fiddle with the uid's only work as root. So the login process, which runs as root, can switch to your uid and then exec a shell. But you cannot switch back to root.

You can run an suid program like passwd to temporarily gain some limited root power. See: https://www.unix.com/tips-tutorials/1...rmissions.html for details on that.

Read up on the id and logname commands. They may prove useful in your investigations.