/usr/local/etc/rc.d/ scripts and non-root user

[Zbigniew Szalbot]

Hello Alex,

2008/2/6, Alex Zbyslaw <xfb52 at dial.pipex.com>:
> Zbigniew Szalbot wrote:
>
> >Hello,
> >
> >I have looked at my /usr/local/etc/rc.d/ and realized that the symlink
> >I put there has the root as owner. It all works but I would rather use
> >a non-root user for to run that script.
> >
> >$ ls -l /usr/local/etc/rc.d/
> >lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel    40 May  9  2007 sender.sh ->
> >/usr/home/api/sender/start.sh
> >
> >So I tried:
> >$ sudo chown api /usr/local/etc/rc.d/sender.sh
> >
> >No error but no change either. The original start.sh file has user api
> >but the symlink is owned by root.
> >
> >How can I make sure that the file is indeed run as user api?
> >
> >
> AFAIK, the owner of a symlink is completely irrelevant.  All accesses to
> the file are checked against the permissions of the file pointed to, not
> the symlink.  (Same if the target of a symlink is a directory).  Once
> upon a time I'm sure all symlinks were owned by root, but could be
> misremembering.
>
> When you ran your chown, it did nothing at all
>
>  From man chown
>
>     Symbolic links named by arguments are silently left
>      unchanged unless -h is used.
>
> If you really care; say you want a find -user api to find that symlink then
>
> chown -h api /usr/local/etc/rc.d/sender.sh
>
> should do what you want.

Thank you. I realized this was the case before I wrote previous
message. The thing is the real file is owned by user api. However,
when the application is started following a reboot, its logs are
created by user root, whereas when I start it by hand as user api, its
logs are owned by user api. So it once caused me a problem because the
existing log file was owned by root and I stopped then started this
particular software by hand as user api. Needless to say, it panicked
about not being able to log what it was doing.

I wonder that indeed a better solution may be to use cron for
automatic startups, which Lowell rightly pointed out to me. I just
loved the simplicity of symlinking sh scripts against
/usr/local/etc/rc.d/ :)

Thank you!

Zbigniew Szalbot