On Fri, 5 Jul 2002 wleeson@indigo.ie wrote:

> 	This is probably a really dumb question but is it possible to give
> a general user the ability to use the shutdown command and if so how?

See how the following shows that shutdown is executable by root and by
members of the operator group. Also see that it is setuid root -- this
means that when it runs, it runs using root's permissions.

$ ls -l `which shutdown`
-r-sr-xr--  1 root  operator  248924 May 20 15:15 /sbin/shutdown

So basically, all you need to do is add the user to that operator group in
/etc/group. (But this will end up giving that user other privileges too.)

   Jeremy C. Reed
   http://www.reedmedia.net/