[Esd-l] Making procmail play "nice"

[Kenneth Porter]

--On Saturday, September 27, 2003 1:12 PM -0700 "John D. Hardin" 
<jhardin at impsec.org> wrote:

> How would the daemon determine the correct recipient UID to become for
> operations like stripping executables to a file? How does it do that
> without the parent daemon being root?

Hmm, good question. spamd runs as root and then forks and suid's on each 
request to the specified user to access his configuration and update his 
Bayes DB. Forks are normally cheap because of copy-on-write semantics. New 
pages aren't allocated until the child touches them. (If spamd doesn't need 
access to a user's files, it can run as a mortal.)