[sudo-users] "nice sudo foo": "foo" does not inherits niceness

[Todd C. Miller]

In message <2753bafa0808180819v50e5bd19w62800a63ee3b553b at mail.gmail.com>
	so spake thomas (thomas.bsd):

> Hi list, here is my question:
> 
> $ (nice sudo sleep 5 &);  ps -al | egrep '(^F|sleep)'
> F S   UID   PID  PPID  C PRI  NI ADDR SZ WCHAN  TTY          TIME CMD
> 4 S     0 15823     1  0  80   0 -   754 -      pts/5    00:00:00 sleep
> 
> Why doesn't "sleep" have a niceness of 10?
> 
> Of course I do not want to add "nice" to /etc/sudoers and run "sudo
> nice foo", that would be quite insecure :-/

The pam_limits.so PAM module (see /etc/security/limits.conf) is
resetting the nice value to zero.  You can remove pam_limits.so
from /etc/pam.d/sudo but that will prevent the resource limits from
being set based on the target user.

 - todd