Shell question

[Richard MacLemale]

Shell gurus,
Is there any way to do the equivalent of su or sudo when using shell()?
When shell() is called you are whoever you logged into OS X as.  It'd be
nifty if you could provide a way to authenticate as root from within mc, so
that the user would not have to literally log into OS X as root.

I know that you can't log into OS X via the Chooser or ftp or telnet as
root... You have to set up rsh or ssh to do it.  Is the same type of
restriction applicable to shell()?

Of course this is not a show stopper by any means, but if there's a way to
do this I'd be interested in hearing what it is.

PS - By using do thisstring as applescript, where thisstring = do shell
script ("whoami"), you can issue UNIX commands with MC 2.4.2... That was
what I was doing before 2.4.3 happened.  But handing things off to
AppleScript is a hack, and it requires AppleScript 1.8 or 1.8.1.  What's
nice is that MC 2.4.3 can issue shell commands 2 to 4 times faster than
doing it through AppleScript.  VERY nice to be able to directly make the
calls.  :)

-- 
:)
Richard MacLemale
Network Administrator
J. W. Mitchell High School