[RESOLVED] urxvt spawns extra process

[dkeg]

I'm not sure I really understand. How does it make sense to spawn an extra process. Kind of sounds like bs to me. How can that even be the slightest bit acceptable?

[pidsley]

I don't understand either, especially because Debian is the only distro that seems to need this extra process. I have been searching and reading, but I can't still can't say I understand this (or why it's necessary)

if urxvt is setgid utmp (as it is now in debian) it forks an helper
process to manage the pty/utmp stuff while the main process drops
priviledges

[machinebacon]

It should rather drop the 'd' in Priviledge :D

[machinebacon]

Extremely stupid question: the groups without associated users (floppy, cdrom, utmp) are also listed in groups. Usually a process should only be able to setid utmp if the group utmp is existing, shouldn't it. This enables to write to /var/run/utmp. Judging from how other terminals do it, they switch to root (xterm, according to a bug report), or use a helper process (gnome-terminal).
Totally unclear.

[xaos52]

They consider being able to see the urxvt process in the 'w' command to be more important than that extra process.
As a consequence, from a security point of view, it makes sense to do it like that.
I was using xterm and eshell in emacs anyway, as I said before, and I will continue to do so.

[DebianJoe]

I was assuming that it was security related as well, ("setuid is dangerous blah, blah, blah"). I have no problem with building from tars, so whatever makes Debian happy...then they can feel free to do it. I'll do what I want apart from them anyhow.

I don't generally see a huge need for a highly updated terminal emulator.

[xaos52]

There is a very simple solution to get rid of that extra process:
Just install the Debian package as normal,
then run the following commands as root:

Code: Select all

chgrp root /usr/bin/urxvt
chmod g-s /usr/bin/urxvt

BINGO!

[pidsley]

There is a very simple solution to get rid of that extra process:

Thank you.

[xaos52]

No problem.
I have added that solution in a response to the bug report.
I am curious what the maintainer will come up with. :D

[dkeg]

Thanks you.

well check that out. Interesting solution. Based on what we've learned, I guess that makes sense. So what group is / would it normally be under? users? I checked mine, both xterm and urxvt, and both are root:root. But the urxvt I have was build from source.

Edit: after some more reading, I think I better understand.

[xaos52]

^ root:root is normal

[Nili]

Many thanks xaos52, that's what i was looking for... :D

Thanks also dkeg that addressed me on this thread. ;)