A pure-Rust library to work with Linux capabilities.
caps provides support for manipulating capabilities available in modern Linux
kernels. It supports traditional POSIX sets (Effective, Inheritable, Permitted)
as well as Linux-specific Ambient and Bounding capabilities sets.
caps provides a simple and idiomatic interface to handle capabilities on Linux.
See capabilities(7) for more details.
This library tries to achieve the following goals:
- fully support modern kernels, including recent capabilities and sets
- provide an idiomatic interface
- be usable in static targets, without requiring an external C library
type ExResult<T> = Result<T, Box<dyn std::error::Error + 'static>>;
fn manipulate_caps() -> ExResult<()> {
    use caps::{Capability, CapSet};
    // Retrieve permitted set.
    let cur = caps::read(None, CapSet::Permitted)?;
    println!("Current permitted caps: {:?}.", cur);
    
    // Retrieve effective set.
    let cur = caps::read(None, CapSet::Effective)?;
    println!("Current effective caps: {:?}.", cur);
    
    // Check if CAP_CHOWN is in permitted set.
    let perm_chown = caps::has_cap(None, CapSet::Permitted, Capability::CAP_CHOWN)?;
    if !perm_chown {
        return Err("Try running this as root!".into());
    }
    // Clear all effective caps.
    caps::clear(None, CapSet::Effective)?;
    println!("Cleared effective caps.");
    let cur = caps::read(None, CapSet::Effective)?;
    println!("Current effective caps: {:?}.", cur);
    // Since `CAP_CHOWN` is still in permitted, it can be raised again.
    caps::raise(None, CapSet::Effective, Capability::CAP_CHOWN)?;
    println!("Raised CAP_CHOWN in effective set.");
    let cur = caps::read(None, CapSet::Effective)?;
    println!("Current effective caps: {:?}.", cur);
    Ok(())
}Some more examples are available under examples.
Licensed under either of
- MIT license - http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT
- Apache License, Version 2.0 - http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
at your option.