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It's possible to do similar things without setuid/root, by modifying the absolute paths in the binaries and config files. To modify binaries, http://nixos.org/patchelf.html . I'm not aware of an automated tool to do this at present.

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Originally, I tried using similar tools (I think I used chrpath, I can't remember whether I tried patchelf) to implement whack, but I found it quite time-consuming to get things working, and had limited success. I chose the current implementation since it was simpler, quicker and more reliable, and the setuid requirement wasn't a problem for my particular use case.

Having said that, it would be great to have an implementation that didn't require setuid/root.

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