Getting root privs

Hi, As you know there are lot of control panels lying around like Cpanel, Lxadmin, most of them based on PHP. The control panels allow editing of system files which requires root privileges, can somebody tell me how to gain root privileges inside the script so that it can be useful if I want to give my users a DNS editing interface instead of loading a big bloated control panel. -- Nilesh Govindarajan Site & Server Administrator www.itech7.com मेरा भारत महान ! मम भारत: महत्तम भवतु !