escaping * in sudoers

[barbara.ruess at allianz.de]

Hi Aaron,
thanks, I got that :-)
But this raises two more questions:
1) What does this part of the sudo documentation mean:
                                                                            
 \x                                                                         
       For any character ``x'', evaluates to ``x''. This is used to escape  
       special characters such as: ``*'', ``?'', ``['', and ``}''.          
                                                                            

2) My original problem is:  someone needs root access to something like  rm
*/mydirectory   or    rm /mydirectory/*/myfile
If I do enter this in the sudoers file this also matches commands like rm
file1 file2 /mydirectory   or  rm /mydirectory/file1  importanttfile
/myfile, which means
the user is able to remove everything.... Is there a solution for this?
Regards, Barbara




Barbara,

When one runs: sudo ls *, the * character is interpreted by the current
shell
you are using.  It replaces the * character with a list of files in your
own
directory before passing it to sudo.  For example, if your directory
contained three files (called one, two, three respectively), and you did a
'sudo ls *', sudo gets passed the options 'ls one three two'.  Next sudo
tries to match it against '/usr/bin/ls *'.  Since sudo never receives the
*,
the comparison fails and the command is denied.

However if you were to type 'sudo ls \*', then sudo actually gets passed
the
*.  However you have to train your users to put the back slash in.  (The
backslash does not need to go into /etc/sudoers.)

I hope this is helpfull.

 -Aaron