menush.rb Use in place of a full-featured shell to allow a user access to only a pre-determined set of commands. Designed for limited access to web servers, shared systems, or admin/debugging consoles. Menus are defined in a YAML file containing an array of hashes; each item in the array will be displayed as an option in the menu, and the hash should define the 'prompt' and 'path' keys. The 'defaults' key is optional, and provides a list of command-line arguments to be passed to the command; the 'allow_args' key establishes whether to prompt the user for additional arguments before launching the command. Example menu definition: --- - path: /usr/bin/uptime prompt: "Check system uptime" - path: /bin/cat prompt: "Display MOTD" defaults: /etc/motd - path: /bin/uname prompt: "Display uname flags" allow_args: true - path: /usr/bin/vim prompt: "Edit a file" allow_args: true Once configured, just add menush.rb to the list of valid login shells in /etc/shells, and then change the user's /etc/passwd entry to use it in place of bash (or whatever shell they had been using). See rcoder's blog post for more details: http://rcoder.net/content/granting-just-enough-power-but-no-more Depends on the HighLine gem and the Ruby stdlib.