[SLUG] shutdown: you must be root to do that!

[Al Girling]

On Thu, Aug 21, 2003 at 12:44:06PM +0100, Gavin Baker wrote:
> Q: How do you give permission to shutdown(8) the machine to regular
> users? 
<snip>
> If we only want users from a special group to be able to execute it, we
> can just make it only executable by the owner and group
> 
> 	$ chmod o-wrx /sbin/shutdown (giving -rwsr-x---)
> 
> and then change the group owner to our special group. Debian has an adm
> group, which seems appropriate. (but we could just create a new
> shutdown, or wheel group of course).
> 
> 	$ chown root.adm /sbin/shutdown 
> 
> -rwsr-x---  1 root  adm   16632 2002-05-28 12:27 /sbin/shutdown
> 
> So anyone we want to let shutdown the machine, we can just add to the
> adm group.
> 
> 	$ adduser fred adm
> 
<snip>

Hi Gav,

I've just got round to trying this.  Everything seemed to go well until trying
out the command when I simply get the message;

bash: shutdown: command not found

The following commands and their output suggest to me I followed your
instructions correctly.

# ls -l /sbin/shutdown

gives me

-rwxr-x---    1 root     adm         15496 May 29  2002 /sbin/shutdown

and 

$ grep adm /etc/group
adm:x:4:al

would I be right to assume 'shutdown' will remain unavailable to me until I
add '/sbin' to my $PATH?  I can't say why, but that seems rather unsafe to me.

Any thoughts or ideas?

Al

P.S. Details of printer setup on there way!
-- 
Al Girling			Registered Linux User: 290080
				http://counter.li.org