[sclug] root-like read-all but not write ability?

[Dickon Hood]

On Wed, Sep 05, 2007 at 21:58:12 +0100, John Stumbles wrote:
: A backup program I'm writing needs to be able to read all files and 
: traverse all directories on the system (as root can do) but it would be 
: nice if it didn't have to be trusted with root's write privileges, since 
: it doesn't need them. I suspect this is one of those wouldn't-it-be-nice 
: things that aren't actually possible, but maybe I'm missing something?

: It's writ in Perl, fwiw

I was about to suggest loopback mounting the filesystem somewhere but
read-only and taking your backup against that, but you can't do it on
Linux.

What you *could* do is snapshot your filesystem, mount it read-only
under a minimal chroot, and chroot your Perl script into it.  Doddle to do
under zfs on Solaris, but I've no idea where to start on linux...

-- 
Dickon Hood

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