Calife – A lightweight alternative to sudo
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The invoked shell is the user's own except when a shell is specified in the configuration file calife.auth.
If "-" is specified on the command line, user's profile files are read as if it was a login shell.
This is not the traditional behavior of su.
Only users specified in calife.auth can use calife to become another one with this method.
calife.auth is installed as /etc/calife.auth
Calife Features
Here is an extensive list of features:
you keep your environment variables and shell aliases intact
it has start and end of session logging
you can have a list of all permitted logins for each calife user. That way, you can give a user newsmaster’s rights without giving out the root password
you can specify a group in the configuration file instead of the logins of all administrators: Juste use @staff or %staff and all members of the staff group will have access to calife
calife can also be used to become users even if they have no home directory or even no shell. That’s very practical if you want to become uucp or even bin
you can make calife runs a specific system-wide script at the end of the session (to send a mailabout what was done as root for example)
Install calife in ubuntu
Open the terminal and run the following command
sudo apt-get install calife
Using Calife
Syntax
calife [-] [login]
Check calife manpage for more details