[X-Unix] App launched by my crontab runs as root if Login Window!

[John Harrold]

Sometime in June Jerry Krinock assaulted the keyboard and produced:

| When the time comes, you will see iCal (or, I believe, any other app)
| show its GUI ***BEHIND THE LOGIN WINDOW***.  It has a menu, and if you
| don't mind working around the login window, you can actually use the
| application, without logging in.  Now go to save a file and you can see
| from your directory access that you are RUNNING AS "root"!

I must admit this is a little strange. On most unix systems running X11,
this would either fail because the user doesn't control the display.

| I don't think I even have the "root" user enabled on my powerbook.

I'm not sure what you mean by enabled. I don't think you can disable the
'root' user on a unix machine and have it work. Every time you run sudo it
executes commands as root. This would not be possible if the 'root' user
was disabled.

| Besides the interesting security implications, I would like to fix this
| because I have written an application which can be so (as above) cronn'ed to
| launch and do some work while a user is out to lunch, but it the user has
| displayed his login window, as smart users do when they go out to lunch, it
| does not run properly since it runs as root - it can't find any of the
| user's files.

A little googling 'gui cron login window site:apple.com' and it seems
someone else has had this problem:

http://lists.apple.com/archives/darwin-userlevel/2003/Dec/msg00007.html

But they don't seem to have a solution either ;(.

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