Authentication Required popup `/bin/sh`

Question

My Ubuntu 18.04 opens the modal dialog

Authentication Required

with the text "Authentication is needed to run '/bin/sh' as super user

This happens just after booting - for no reason know to me!

I don't know where Budgie stores the programs that will run at startup.
I would look there first. — Carlos Dagorret, Oct 18 '19 at 18:37
The fact that the dialog doesn't show the app/process that initiated the request is a bug — Pablo Bianchi, May 13 '20 at 18:15
May indeed have been dropbox: I did an experiment to see how a root owned file would be handled. Even as I changed the ownership and deleted the file, I got the popup, however not on a subsequent boot. — vanadium, Aug 02 '20 at 07:14

score 6 · Answer 1 · edited Jun 12 '20 at 14:37

6

Do you have Dropbox installed?

If Dropbox finds files in its folder that aren't owned by your user, it will try to run a script with super user privileges to change the ownership of those files to your user.

If you click Cancel, Dropbox won't run the script but you'll continue to get the popup because it will continue to detect the problem.

If you're able to confirm it is Dropbox causing the popup, then the solution is to enter your credentials and let it run the script.

More details here.

I myself ran into this problem, but since I run Xfce the dialog has an expandable Details option that allowed me to figure out the source of the popup:

edited Jun 12 '20 at 14:37

Community

1

answered Jan 14 '20 at 20:21

bmaupin

4,930

4

Why doesn't this window give any indication which task wants to run /bin/sh as root? This is super dangerous and could easily be malware. Kinda like: just trust the unknown and enter the password so the trojan can encrypt all your files ;-) – Markus Bawidamann May 01 '21 at 08:32

score 3 · Answer 2 · edited May 13 '20 at 17:32

3

I also have the same issue

Since I did not want to just allow it - since I don't know what it is - I did this:

Check for programs that are starting after boot by opening "Startup Applications"

And verify that only desired applications do start.

If you have Dropbox (like pointet out by bmaupin) then search for files which you are not the owner of

ls -Rl Dropbox/ |grep -vP 'YourUserName|total|Dropbox.*:|^$'

this Searches for all files where the user is not YourUserName, omits Parent Directories of files and also omits empty lines

Change the ownership of files to your user ($USER) and group
```
sudo chown YourUserName:YourGroupName /path/do/file
```

edited May 13 '20 at 17:32

Pablo Bianchi

15,657

answered Feb 20 '20 at 10:03

Thorsten Niehues

1,277
5
17
32

1

I would find those unreadable files this way – Pablo Bianchi May 14 '20 at 00:56
A good solution but a better way to search would be "find Dropbox ! -user USERNAME" because it will show the full path to the file. Although not recommended because you don't know if a file needs to be owned by some other user (but shouldn't in the Dropbox folder) you could use "sudo find Dropbox ! -user USERNAME -exec chown USERNAME:USERNAME {} ;" to find and fix all the files. – schworak May 09 '22 at 14:24

Authentication Required popup `/bin/sh`

2 Answers2