How can I grant a non-root user access to a root libary?

Question

I want to give a non-root user the rights to view and write a specific root directory. Is this possible? If so, how?

Answer 1

The direct answer to your question is certainly not the best solution. You'll want to put the files you want to share into somewhere a little more public. To let everyone see it (but only the owner writes to it):

# mkdir -p /path/to/share/
# mv /root/sharedfile /path/to/share/
# chmod 644 /path/to/share/sharedfile 

If you really want to give a non-root user access to /root consider adding them to group sudo or adding them to /etc/sudoers. Then they can access /root by doing something like:

$ sudo ls /root

Answer 2

One simple solution is to make the non-sudo user the owner of that particular file.

chown new-owner  filename

Answer 3

Yes, assuming you have root privileges, it is possible. root can do anything (except on newer Macs) - even if it's not ordinarily a good idea.

One way to do this is to use your root privileges to simply add your non-root user (call him nonroot for this answer) to the sudoers file:

sudo visudo

Once the sudoers file is open, you can add the following:

nonroot          ALL = (ALL) ALL

Save & close the sudoers file, and it is done.

Note this gives user nonroot the same privileges as root.... and root can do anything.

But I may have misunderstood your question... If your question was how to allow nonroot to access files or folders under /root (e.g. /root/librarydir), the answer is a little different. Instead of the line above, add this line instead:

nonroot ALL = (root) sudoedit /root/librarydir/*

This gives user nonroot the ability to make changes to files in that location.