On Wed, 22 Jun 2005, Filippo Cattaneo wrote:

> If you su to root, a root-only app should work within the terminal,

Indeed.  We actually use "sudo -s", but the principle is the same.

> bit if the app is graphical, it calls on graphical resources,
> and you may get error messages as it tries to open a window
> in a nonprivileged user's X session.

I'd recommend running X via an ssh tunnel (this gets it encrypted, as 
well as providing its own authentication).  If and when it's necessary 
to get this to work as root, one can copy the authentication magic 
from the unprivileged session to the sudo-ed session.  I rarely do 
that myself, so I won't try to spell out the details, but I know that 
when I needed it, it was quite straightforward.

> To change a file's ownership, the command is "chown"
> e.g. http://www.rt.com/man/chown.1.html

Indeed.  But beware that if you're working on an NFS-mounted file 
system from some other server, then root may or may not have been 
given authority to interfere with other users' files (see the 
root_squash options).