escl

Introduction

escl is a program for elevating privileges to root. As a regular Linux desktop user and programmer, I have very little use for the intricate bloat of sudo, and while doas is better, I felt it could still be more minimal. This program only implements two things:

1. Choosing which users are allowed to use it, and which passwords they can authenticate with
2. Giving those users root privileges when run

The point of escl is that it is utterly dependency-free (except for certain POSIX standard functions and libcypt, which should be available on effectively every Linux system ever). Its allowed users and passwords are stored separately from all other programs, so you can easily drag-and-drop it in and out of any system without being afraid of breaking something.

Dependencies

Software / system dependencies are:

• A shell environment for execution

Management

• To build the program, run make
• To install the program, run make install
• To uninstall all program files from the system, run make uninstall

Usage

Immediately following installation:

1. Login as root
2. Give users permission to use escl with escl -ua <user1> -ua <user2> ...
3. Add a password for permitted users to authenticate with using escl -pa

When usage is actually needed:

1. Run the command you wish to execute, prefixed by escl. For example, a non-root user may run escl pacman -Syu in a similar way to how they would run sudo pacman -Syu
2. Enter one of the added passwords

Security / maintenance:

• To revoke users' abilities to use escl, run escl -ur <user1> -ur <user2> ...
• To remove a password, run escl -pr and enter the password you wish to revoke
• To regenerate the salt and hash used for storing a password, simply remove it using escl -pr and readd it using escl -pa

Contributing

I am not accepting pull requests, this program is entirely for my own usage. Feel free to fork this project and make your own version.