On Mar 20, 9:46 am, Jonathan Gardner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > In the unix world, this is highly discouraged. You shouldn't have to > change your user. The only user who can change roles---and who should > change roles for security reasons---is root.
IMHO this statement is a bit too broad. The original poster didn't specify that he wanted to become root. Running a command as a different user is useful for other cases besides running as root. For instance, your web server's documents directory may be owned by a www user who doesn't have a normal login shell. If you're on your 'regular' user and need to edit a document it's quite handy to do this: sudo -u www emacs index.html As for the original poster, you could use the subprocess module combined with sudo to do what you want - spawn a subprocess which runs sudo and the other program, which could itself be a python script or anything else. regards, Preston -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
