Test if the user is root

Apr 10, 2013 by David Farrell

When Perl is executing a program, it maintains the user id of the process owner in a global variable ($<). When a Perl program is executed by root or a user with root privileges (e.g. using the sudo command), the user id variable is always set to zero. This can be checked at the command line:

$ perl -e 'print $< . \n;'
1000
$ sudo perl -e 'print $< . \n;'
0

Because the root user id is always zero and in Perl zero is treated as false, it is a trivial task to test if the user is root during runtime. This can be used to for flow control, such as exiting the program early:

use Carp qw/croak/;

if ($<) {
    croak "Error: exiting program as not executed by root\n";
}

In Windows the user id variable is always set to zero and is of limited use. However the Perl Win32 module has the Win32::IsAdminUser() method that can be used instead of $<, like this:

use Win32;
use Carp qw/croak/;

if (not Win32::IsAdminUser()) {
    croak "Error: exiting program as not executed by root\n";
}

This article was originally posted on PerlTricks.com.