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Is it possible to use a sudo frontend (like gksudo) to elevate the privileges of the current process? I know I can do the following: sudo cat /etc/passwd- But I'm interested in doing this: sudo-become-root # magic function/command cat /etc/passwd- I'm writing in Python. My usecase is that I have a program that runs as the user, but may encounter files to read/write that are root-owned. I'd like to prompt for password, gain root privileges, do what I need, and then optionally drop privileges again. I know I could separate admin logic and non-admin logic into separate processes, and then just run the admin process as root (with some communication -- policykit/dbus would be a good fit here). But I was hoping for a much simpler (though admittedly more risky) solution. I'm thinking something like running Solaris's ppriv through sudo to then modify the current process's privileges. Which seems like a hacky-but-workable roundtrip. But as far as I know, linux doesn't offer ppriv. (I'm surprised this isn't obvious already; it seems like a not-uncommon thing to want and doesn't seem to be a security hole to allow escalation in-process over escalation of a new process.)

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