What is the proper way to enable a normal user to shutdown, halt or reboot the computer?

linux shutdown reboot

6,605

Solution 1

All users? Or a selected subset of them? Will they use the computer locally or also remotely (e.g. via ssh).

In case of a few users who also work remotely sudo will work fine. See this link for details.

If they are logging in locally and via a GUI then there are better options. E.g. capturing the three finger salute via init and letting that trigger a 1 minute delayed shutdown. It has been ages since I set that up though, so I skipping on the details for that. (I used that back when Slackware 3 was modern)

Solution 2

If your shutdown accepts the -a switch (check with shutdown --help), you can do the following:

Add the users that should be able to shut the system down to /etc/shutdown.allow.

Example:
```
userA
userB
```
Shut the system down using the -a switch.

Example:
```
shutdown -a -h now
```

Source: UNIX man pages : shutdown (8)

Solution 3

I use SL 6.4. It has user version of poweroff, halt, reboot provided by usermode package. I can shutdown, reboot as a normal user (from the command line as well)

    $ which {poweroff,reboot,halt}
    /usr/bin/poweroff
    /usr/bin/reboot
    /usr/bin/halt

    rpm -qf $(which poweroff reboot halt)
    usermode-1.102-3.el6.x86_64
    usermode-1.102-3.el6.x86_64
    usermode-1.102-3.el6.x86_64

As root

    # which {poweroff,reboot,halt}
    /sbin/poweroff
    /sbin/reboot
    /sbin/halt

    # rpm -qf $(which poweroff reboot halt)
    upstart-0.6.5-12.el6.x86_64
    upstart-0.6.5-12.el6.x86_64
    upstart-0.6.5-12.el6.x86_64

6,605

ccpizza

Just visiting this planet.

Updated on September 18, 2022

Comments

ccpizza almost 2 years

My dirty solution is to chmod +s /sbin/shutdown. It works but this is probably not good practice and insecure. Moreover after some system updates the suid bit gets reset. What would be the correct way to do it?
- kobaltz almost 12 years
  
  i usually do sudo shutdown now -h
ccpizza almost 12 years

Either a single user or a group such as %users. The idea is to avoid using sudo every time and entering passwords. According to the link you posted a line in sudoers like %users ALL=NOPASSWD:/sbin/shutdown is probably all I need. Thank you!
ccpizza almost 12 years

looks like my version of shutdown (generic Linux of the -buntu family) does not support the -a option. Looks like the expected way is to create a %shutdown group which would include the users who need to shutdown and then reference that in the sudoers file.