runas — program to run daemons as non priviledge users

       This manual page was written by Javier Fernandez-Sanguino Pen~a <jfs@debian.org> for  the  Debian  system
       (but may be used by others).  Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under
       the  terms  of the GNU General Public License, Version 2 any later version published by the Free Software
       Foundation.

       On Debian systems, the complete text of the GNU General Public License can be found in /usr/share/common-
       licenses/GPL.

                                                                                                   TITANTOOLS(8)

runas is a small program that allows administrators a generic way to run daemons as non privileged users.

       runas  is  equivalent  to  using su     but it strips off the environment and does not require the target
       user's shell to be legitimate (that is, listed under /etc/shells)

       The main reason of using runas is to avoid having daemons run as the root user, in some cases this  might
       be  necessary  (like  login  programs,  such as ssh or telnetd that need to switch to the user making the
       connection) but in many cases it might not be necessary at all.  It can be also a  good  replacement  for
       su,  since  it prevents attacks to daemons through the use of environment variables. Just change (in your
       initialisation scripts under /etc/init.d) the line:

              su - daemon -c /usr/bin/blah

       to:

              runas daemon daemongroup /usr/bin/blah

       runas — program to run daemons as non priviledge users

       This program just takes two command line options:

       -?        Show summary of options.

       -cdirectory
                 Chroot the daemon to a specific directory before execution.

chroot(2), chroot(8)

runas [-cdirectorio][uid]  [gid]  [umask]  [program]  [[options]]