Problem:

It is sometimes desirable to have a program run at the privilege level of a user other than that of the user who starts the program.  A classic example is an operator who is responsible for running backups.  The operator should not be allowed root privileges, but the backup program itself must have global read access in order to do its job.

There is a combination of flags for the chmod command which will cause an executable file to run as another user (see "man chmod").  However, doing this to a Cobol program causes a failure to load runtime system components (.so files) and the program terminates very shortly after the startup attempt.

Resolution:

Due to security concerns and operating system limitations, this is not recommended and is unsupported for Cobol programs.