If you wish to make other applications accessible to console users, you will have to do just a little bit more work.
First of all, console access only works for applications which reside in /sbin or /usr/sbin, so the application that you wish to run must be there. After verifying that, do the following steps:
Create a link from the name of your application, such as our sample foo program, to the /usr/bin/consolehelper application:
cd /usr/bin ln -s consolehelper foo |
Create the file /etc/security/console.apps/foo:
touch /etc/security/console.apps/foo |
Create a PAM configuration file for the foo service in /etc/pam.d/. An easy way to do this is to start with a copy of the halt service's PAM configuration file, and then modify the file if you want to change the behavior:
cp /etc/pam.d/halt /etc/pam.d/foo |
Now, when you run /usr/bin/foo, it will call consolehelper, which will authenticate the user with the help of /usr/sbin/userhelper. To authenticate the user, consolehelper will ask for the user's password if /etc/pam.d/foo is a copy of /etc/pam.d/halt (otherwise, it will do precisely what is specified in /etc/pam.d/foo) and then run /usr/sbin/foo with root permissions.