Calife

Calife is small program that enable a UNIX system administrator to become root (or another user) on his/her machines without giving the root password but his/her own.

The most interesting features of calife are:

* you keep your environment variables and shell aliases intact

* it has start and end of session logging

* you can have a list of all permitted logins for each calife user. That way, you can give a user newsmaster’s rights without giving out the root password

* you can specify a group in the configuration file instead of the logins of all administrators: Juste use @staff and all members of the staff will have access to calife

* calife can also be used to become users even if they have no home directory or even no shell. That’s very practical if you want to become uucp or even bin

* you can make calife runs a specific system-wide script at the end of the session (to send a mail about what was done as root for example)