XSU 8 September 1st, 2001 xsu GNOME User's Manual xsu su for GNOME xsu OPTION xsu, is a tool to replace the `su -c command` in Gnome. When the user executes xsu, he will be prompted for a command, a username and a password. If the username and password are correct xsu will execute the command as the entered user. So if the username was root, then the command will be executed as root. The security of all older xsu versions was very bad. With xsu version 0.1.0 I introduced the use of a pipe to a secured non-Gnome SUID application. Because xsu is not as secure as the normal su command (for example the one from GNU sh-utils), I still don't recommend using xsu on computers where security is an important issue. It's way easier to do bruteforce password attacks on suidxsu then on GNU's su from the sh-utils package. You could consider using the sudo program on these computers. This program follows the usual GNU command line syntax, with long options starting with two dashes (`--'). A summary of the options supported by xsu is included below. -c, --command COMMAND Set the command to be executed -m, --message MESSAGE Set the message to be displayed; you can use the character ^ in your message if you want to use a new line, and the character ~ if you want to use a tabulation. If no message is set, then the default message will be used. -u, --username USERNAME Set the username to execute the command as xsu -c "gmenu" -u "root" -m "To start the Menu Editor^you have to enter^the root password^here." Please report bugs to the Author. su(1), sudo(1), suidxsu(1) XSU Homepage Philip Van Hoof freax@pandora.be This man-page was written by Jan Schaumann jschauma@netmeister.org as part of "The Missing Man Pages Project".