Originally posted by: raja7

what is setuid and setgid? what is the purpose of that?
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Originally posted by: orphy

Well, Phil answered your question about sticky bit but instead of telling you what SUID/SGID are, I'll attempt to show you how to find the answer yourself.

Try this.

google.com
search on "what is setuid and setgid?"

Feel free to come back if you still have questions after doing some reading on your own. Good luck!
Orphy
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Originally posted by: raja7

sure orphy...

But phil answer is simple and good. Thats why i post this also..
Ok i will check it out, if i have any query i will come to you.

thanks.
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Originally posted by: srinivas_AIX

Whenever a set uid permission is given, the user will have the privileges similar to root and when set gid is given, all the users in that group will have the root priveleges, along with the owner of the group.
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Originally posted by: SystemAdmin

no. not necessarily always root permission. Rather, the program runs with the permission of the owner of the program and not the one who runs the program.

Given a user "john". And "ls -l program" says the program's owner is "mary" and the program is suid. When john executes the program, the program will run and will have permission to that of mary and not john.

In normal situation wherein an executable program is not suid. When a user "A" runs that program, the program will run having the user A's permission. Therefore, suid programs is a little tricky technique of making the program assume permission of someone else rather than the one who runs the program.

So you see, it is not necessarily root permission but instead, the program owner's permission. If the programs is owned by root, then it will be with root permission, like the case of /bin/passwd.

This is one area where i've known lots of guys think they understand it but upon deeper inspection they don't.

gid follows the same logic.
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