Alex Rivera | Logout

What is the best way for checking if the user of a script has root-like privileges?

Asked 2010-05-10T22:31:05.317
107

I have a Python script that will be doing a lot of things that would require root-level privileges, such as moving files in /etc, installing with apt-get, and so on. I currently have:

if os.geteuid() != 0:
    exit("You need to have root privileges to run this script.\nPlease try again, this time using 'sudo'. Exiting.")

Is this the best way to do the check? Are there other best practices?

python root privileges
Edit
Report

1 Answer

1

It all depends how portable you want you app to be. If you mean bussiness, the we have to assume that administrator account does not always equal 0. This means that checking for euid 0 is not enough. Problem is, there are situations where one command will behave as if you are root and next will fail with permission denied (think SELinux & co.). Therefore it's really better to fail gracefully and check for EPERM errno whenever it's appropriate.

answered 2010-05-10T22:52:27.850

Your Answer