Bug 7582

Summary: xdg-su should not care if there is no GUI when being run as root.
Product: Portland Reporter: Tom Whipple <bug>
Component: xdg-utilsAssignee: Fathi Boudra <fabo>
Status: RESOLVED MOVED QA Contact:
Severity: normal    
Priority: high    
Version: unspecified   
Hardware: x86 (IA32)   
OS: Linux (All)   
Whiteboard:
i915 platform: i915 features:
Attachments: Don't depend on $DISPLAY if already in the right account

Description Tom Whipple 2006-07-20 15:32:25 UTC
Suppose we are already root. Then,

# xdg-su -c whoami

Should simply print "root" without any difficulty. Instead,
Command (xdg-su -c whoami) gave exit code 3, expected 0
Incorrect output written to stdout, as shown below
expected stdout:root

Unexpected output written to stderr, as shown below:
stderr:xdg-su: no graphical method available for invoking 'whoami' as 'root'

See test case xdg-su/t.su_basic_asroot
Comment 1 Waldo Bastian 2006-07-31 08:38:05 UTC
Defer till after 1.0
xdg-su will be dropped from 1.0 release
Comment 2 Nicolas Lécureuil 2009-08-03 13:36:44 UTC
works perfectly here

#./xdg-su -c whoami
root

can you still reproduce with a cvs snapshot ?
Comment 3 Francois Gouget 2012-12-05 19:53:48 UTC
I can still reproduce this problem here:

# DISPLAY= xdg-su -c whoami
xprop:  unable to open display ''
./xdg-su: 304: [: x: unexpected operator
xdg-su: no graphical method available for invoking 'whoami' as 'root'


xdg-su does say that it's meant 'for use inside a desktop session only'. But I still feel it would make sense to fix this (see the attached patch).
Comment 4 Francois Gouget 2012-12-05 19:55:05 UTC
Created attachment 71041 [details] [review]
Don't depend on $DISPLAY if already in the right account
Comment 5 Francois Gouget 2015-12-07 10:14:22 UTC
This bug is still present in b110b355 (2015/11/12).
Comment 6 Simon Lees (SUSE) 2016-11-03 00:31:33 UTC
Personally I don't think it makes sense to run xdg-su outside a graphical session, if one launches a desktop file calling xdg-su then a graphical prompt needs to be shown to ask for the password. If you are running from a terminal using "su -c".

There is of course the issues around wayland where I don't think xdg-su works currently.
Comment 7 GitLab Migration User 2019-02-16 13:28:13 UTC
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