Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

[shankargopal]

Hi

I have a couple of backup scripts that I wrote in Puppy - very basic, clunky things, but they work for me and have saved me many times from pen drive crashes, lost pen drives etc. Once in a while I experiment with other distros in persistent mode on my flash drive (current experimental candidate is Mint, running alongside Dpup 484 beta 4, which is the main workhorse right now). I'd like to port these scripts over but I have a very basic problem, born out of the fact taht most of my scripting experience has been in Puppy. The problem is this: how do you mount a device in a script in a multiuser environment (where mounting is superuser only)?

The reason is that the backup scripts check all attached storage devices for a certain file name that consists of an image, which the script then uses to store incremental backups (done using rsync and hard links). The image file is required because the backups are almost always on VFAT / NTFS file systems (as these are mostly not computers that I own).

But to check for the file, the script has to mount each device in turn, and this is impossible because it is not running as root. I can't use /etc/fstab either as the devices will be different on each computer that I boot from the flash drive on. I had a vague memory from my last time using a multiuser distro (about five years ago - that was before my Puppy epiphany ) that one can use setuid but apparently most distros now disallow setuid for scripts. So what does one do?

Thanks in advance!

[Pizzasgood]

You could have it use 'su' to run them as root. Or install sudo and do the same thing, the difference being that sudo would let you limit which programs could be run with root permissions, and would use the user's password instead of root's password (because while having passwords in scripts is generally a bad idea, and having root's password much worse - though severity really depends on the application).

[shankargopal]

Thanks a lot, Pizzasgood. For anyone else reading this thread who, like me, was initially confused about how to use sudo in a script when it will prompt for a password, you can use the -S command line option to make it read the password from standard input. Another and more secure option is here:

http://www.askdavetaylor.com/how_can_i_hide_passwords_in_a_shell_script.html

[nooby]

So does it work for you now?

Some of us have asked similar question and maybe they would be happy to know how to do it too?

[big_bass]

shankargopal


if you install ROX you'll have drag N drop power to make it very easy
I have used these many times on my slackware box

I even made a xfilemout package for slackware using ROX that works the same way puppy does by clicking on the files to mount them
if you are interested I 'll post it too

[sunburnt]

Simple and nice Big Bass, but specifying the partition type isn`t necessary.
Making your script much simplier, this does the mounting part:

[big_bass]

sunburnt


thanks I am always looking for some snippet to save a few steps
and I was able to play a bit and make an "emergency mount tool"
nothing fancy just works with rox and Xdialog
when you just set up a box

[sunburnt]

The " isn`t needed when assigning a string to a variable, only when you use it.
This preserves the "new lines" when it`s used with echo. echo "$BN" > (file)

[big_bass]

Hey sunburnt

[sunburnt]

big_bass; I have a couple of text files of shell code scraps and some gtkDialog code.
If you`d like them I`ll PM them to you... T.

[big_bass]

sunburnt