Finding Passwords

[Barry Shein]

>But why should
>login be setuid?  Seems to me it only really needs to be executed by
>getty, which runs as root anyway.  Flame me if I am completely confused.

you're not completely confused, only a little :-)

People run "login user" directly to re-login as another user, similar
to using su but killing the previous environment. One good reason for
doing this is you want the new environment and logging out/in would
drop a modem connection, not uncommon. This gets around this (there
are other possible situations, of course, but I figured I'd head off
"give me one good reason why...")
-- 
        -Barry Shein

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