[goMac]

I'm designing a program in RealBasic which needs to have full access to the "System" folder. It works nicely under Root, but unfortunetly, under any other user OS X keeps me from making changes to the System folder.

Another idea I had was to have my program automatically set up Root user access through the shell, and instructing the user on how to log into Root. I am using "Sudo passwd Root" for this. But, OS X requires the password to be entered on two seperate prompts, neither of which can be entered into using "sudo passwd root; thepass; thepass". The ";" dosn't fill in prompts but will issue "thepass" as a command after I fill in the prompts in the command line.

Someone please help! No one has been able to answer my question! I would really like to be able to access the System folder in a normal user account. I also don't want to have to issue all commands having to deal with moving and editing files through the shell. I would instead like to have full access to the "System" folder using RealBasic's native commands.

[Angus_D]

I don't think that you can with REALbasic's current shell class. This would be easy if you used Objective-C and Cocoa, since the Authentication framework allows an app to gain root privs. Perhaps it would be possible in some convoluted way using a plugin, but they have to be written in C++, so it would probably need lots of messy bridging.

Why do you need to modify /System, anyway? It's bad karma to do so, and Apple's official word is "don't do it".

I strongly suggest learning Obj-C/Cocoa, it's not that complicated and you'll benefit a lot from it.

[Millennium]

[Oops; there was a misunderstanding here. Disregard this post entirely.]

[This message has been edited by Millennium (edited 05-18-2001).]

[eevyl]

I just found a way to execute shell commands as root with REALbasic, the final command string I send to the shell class is something like this:

"echo password | sudo -S command"

Where password is the root password and command is the chosen command to execute. The trick here is to use the "S" option of sudo, which redirects the keyboard input to standard input, in this case the result of the echo command.

[Lorin Rivers]

this is exactly what you need to do. There are a few things that you cannot do, such as "top".

[Angus_D]

And would be much better/easier to do in Cocoa! Using the Authentication framework to gain super-user privs for an NSTask seems like a much better way of doing things.

[eevyl]

Well Angus, we already know that with Cocoa it is easy.... buuuut we want to know how to do it with REALbasic. Is that so hard to understand?

[hayesk]

Originally posted by eevyl:
Well Angus, we already know that with Cocoa it is easy.... buuuut we want to know how to do it with REALbasic. Is that so hard to understand?

Is there a way (theoretical or actual) to use Cocoa objects from RealBasic or C++? I guess that's the million dollar question.

[goMac]

Originally posted by Lorin Rivers:
this is exactly what you need to do. There are a few things that you cannot do, such as "top".

Wow.... Someone from REAL software came all this way to answer my question..... I am humbled...

[Angus_D]

Originally posted by hayesk:
Is there a way (theoretical or actual) to use Cocoa objects from RealBasic or C++? I guess that's the million dollar question.

Short answer: No and no.
Long answer: Maybe.

C++ needs to have bridging functions, as you can see from Apple's sample code page. Apple is working on reimplementing Obj-C++, so that should do away with that problem.

REALbasic might be able to use them in theory, but you'd need to do some haquery. Someone made a custom plugin linker thing for CodeWarrior to enable you to call functions inside Mach-O libraries from CFM applications. This might enable you to load Foundation or something, but then I'm not sure how you'd go about implementing Obj-C code (I know CW has an Obj-C compiler but their runtime is probably different than Apple's). You could conceivably write your own framework with C functions which use Obj-C classes, and then link against that with a REALbasic plugin. I'm not sure if it would work though, and would become an evil mess. Might be an interesting thing for someone to try, though.