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linuxrpmrpm-speclinux-capabilities

Making an RPM which sets POSIX files capabilities


How does one make an RPM which sets the POSIX capabilities of a file? If I try doing rpmbuild as a non-root user then I get an error when my makefile's install hooks try to run setcap, but if I don't run setcap how will rpmbuild copy the capabilities? There doesn't seem to be any way to set the capability from within the RPM spec file.


Solution

  • There is a spec file macro for setting capabilities, %caps; for some reason this seems to be mainly documented in the release notes and changelogs, so it took a while for me to find it.

    It's used like this in the spec file:

    %caps(cap_net_admin=pe) %{_sbindir}/foobar
    

    To get make install to use setcap only when invoked by root, you can do something like this:

    @if test `id -u` -eq 0; then \
        setcap cap_net_admin=pe $(DEST_SBINDIR)/foobar ; \
    fi