Which commands (in /bin & /usr/bin) must have set user ID (for root)

[System Mangler]

In article <8545 at sun.uucp>, guy at sun.uucp (Guy Harris) writes:
> In a system using NFS, it is impossible to prevent a file from being opened
> for writing by a process on one machine if another machine is using that
> file as a shared text (because it's impossible for the machine on which the
> file resides to find out who's holding on to it), so the writes are allowed
> to go through; however, if the process using that file tries to fetch a
> page from a file that has been modified since the process in question first
> attached to it, it gets zapped by a SIGKILL (a message is printed on the
> user's terminal, if there's a terminal associated with this process).

This problem is even worse with dual-ported disks.  The read-only side
is completely clueless about the writes, and the process (usually some
daemon like sendmail) gets a mixture of old and new pages.  If you're
lucky, the process dies.  We only update the read/write side late on
Saturday nights, but we still get bit.

/etc/update's liking for holding certain directories open all the time
causes similar problems when those directories are updated.  I've never
understood the purpose of that.

Don Speck   speck at vlsi.caltech.edu  {seismo,rutgers}!cit-vax!speck