I need to execute an install script using sudo, but towards the end of the script, the script needs to drop out of sudo and continue as the regular user.
Example:
sudo ./install.sh
script runs and does what it needs to as root
su myscriptuser
service myscript start
Basically, the service myscript start needs to be run by the regular user, not by root.
su myscriptuser starts another shell in the name of myscriptuser and waits until it exits. Then it proceeds to run service myscript start in the name of root again.
What you need instead of the last 2 commands is sudo:
sudo -u myscriptuser service myscript start
Related
Using the Linux terminal, I run bash scripts (.sh files) containing sequences of commands I want to execute.
The issue is that I am unable to run a Docker command from within my shell script. I can run this Docker command when it's typed directly at the terminal with root privileges but not when I include it in the shell script file.
My script executed as a general user from command line, looks like this:
#!/usr/bin/env bash
cd /home/user/docker_backup
# remove /home/user/docker_backup/data
rm -rf data
# Switch to root privileges. my system is set to only run Docker as root
su
# Copy a folder from Docker container to host OS
docker cp <container-name>:/home/user/data /home/user/docker_backup
# More general user commands
cd ..
My code only runs until the su line above. After i enter the root password, nothing happens. if i type exit, i get permission errors, meaning the docker cp command failed.
**
This is my desired solution
**After thorough research, as I wanted to run my script as a general user, and only run certain commands as Root when necessary, I came up with a solution that works.
My script now looks like this (run with
$ sh script_name.sh):
#!/usr/bin/env bash
cd /home/user/docker_backup
# remove /home/user/docker_backup/data
rm -rf data
# Switch to root privileges. my system is set to only run Docker as root
su - root -c "docker cp <container-name>:/home/user/data /home/user/docker_backup"
# More general user commands
cd ..
Run shell script as general user. For commands that require root privileges, I use su - root -c "<command>". Terminal prompts for root password and executes command in quotes as root, then shell proceeds as general user.
Actually posting this as an answer:
You switch your current user to root during the script, but the script was executed by your own user.
So the docker cp command will also be executed as your own user, but you will be logged into the root account.
This results in you not seeing the output of docker cp (which might give you insight to not working - I think insufficient privilege).
A solution to this is either using sudo before docker cp, starting the script as root or adding your user to the group "docker", which authorizes your user to use the docker commands
I had the similar issue where the docker commands were running fine on the Terminal but the same commands were not running when I compiled them into a bash script and the issue was basically because of two reasons.
The docker commands need to be run with uplifted privileges that is with the sudo command ( Eg: sudo docker ps works but docker ps won't work). One could add the current user to docker group so that we need not use sudo with each docker command. Please visit this link and follow the section 2 to do the same.
Run the script in the correct way
One should have #! bin/bash at the starting of the script. It is a shebang that is required by each script.
One should save the file without .sh extension
One should provide the execution permission to the script by giving command chmod 777 script_name
run the script with bash script_name
If a bash script has been executed with sudo, how can a command within the script run as the currently logged in user, instead of root and then revert to root to continue running other commands?
For example: -
#!/usr/bash
touch fileOwnedByRoot.txt
touch fileOwnedByUser.txt
touch otherRootFile.txt
If this script is run with sudo, without changing the order of commands, how can the 2nd touch command be run as the standard user?
The script is only a simple example, so using chmod to change ownership of files created is irrelevant.
The actual script I'm using is being run by an installer, so running with elevated privileges is a requirement, but specific commands must be run as the user running the installer, whose name is not known.
Use su - another_user -c "<command>" to run that specific command:
#!/bin/bash
touch /tmp/f1
su - another_user -c "touch /tmp/f2"
touch /tmp/f3
As commented by chepner below, you need to use $SUDO_USER or $SUDO_UID to get the name of the real user running the sudo command:
su - $SUDO_USER -c "touch /tmp/f2"
This way, the file will be touched by the user running the command.
You can test with:
#!/bin/bash
echo "sudo_user: $SUDO_USER"
echo "sudo_uid: $SUDO_UID"
And run the script either with ./script or sudo ./script. In the second case the values will be populated.
Don't run the script as sudo, just the commands that require elevated privileges.
#!/bin/bash
sudo touch fileOwnedByRoot.txt
touch fileOwnedByUser.txt
sudo touch otherRootFile.txt
According to the man page the environment variable SUDO_USER is set when you run sudo, so you could do something like:
#!/usr/bash
touch fileOwnedByRoot.txt
sudo ${SUDO_USER} touch fileOwnedByUser.txt
touch otherRootFile.txt
I haven't tested this, and don't know if it work differently on OSX, but it's worth a shot.
this is probably a really simple question. I apologize if it is a duplicate.
I want to know how to remove sudo permissions for one particular command. I've created a script that installs a bunch of .deb packages and it needs sudo to do that, but one command in it needs to run without sudo permissions, so how would I do that? I'm using Ubuntu and this is a bash script.
I'm calling my script: ROS_install
Here is part of the script:
sudo dpkg -i /home/forklift/Desktop/ROS/ros-hydro-laser-proc_0.1.3-0precise-20131015-2054-+0000_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i /home/forklift/Desktop/ROS/ros-hydro-urg-c_1.0.403-0precise-20131010-0128-+0000_amd64.deb
sudo rosdep init
sleep 2
rosdep update
The command "rosdep update" needs to be run without sudo permissions. I assumed that it was already, but I get a warning every time I run the script, and thus get locked out of the command after installation.
Rather than give the entire script elevated privileges, just give them to the actual commands that need them. That is, rather than
$ sudo my_script
modify my_script to use sudo only on those commands that need it. For instance, if this is your script:
command1
command2
command3
command4
command5
and command3 is the non-sudo command, modify your script to read
sudo command1
sudo command2
command3
sudo command4
sudo command5
In the process, think about whether command1 actually needs to run with sudo, or it it can run just as well without. In that way, you should be able to greatly reduce the number of commands that actually need to be run with sudo in your script.
If your command is running with full privileges, it also has the privilege to demote its own privileges, for good or for the duration of one command, by running su.
touch /privileged
su -c 'cp /privileged /tmp/not' nobody
I assume you are calling your script like:
sudo script.sh
And you do not want all of the commands within the script to run as root.
If your script is like:
apt-get install perl
apt-get install python
mv trash /home/user/
And you only want to run the first two commands as root you can specify a specific user for the third like:
su -c "mv trash /home/user/" user
Where user is the username you want to run the command as.
This will allow you to make a single sudo call at the parent level when you call the script.
If you don't want the username hardcoded, you can use a command like logname to get the username of the user that you are logged in as.
Just adding to the other answers, you can do this:
su -c "command" $SUDO_USER
Which will execute the command as the actual user who typed the sudo command
That's very useful when you are making scripts that require sudo to install something and write something in the user's $HOME
I have a simple shell script that is run with sudo as most of the script requires it, yet one of the commands in the script is a Homebrew install, which cannot be executed with sudo..
So, my question is when executing a shell script with sudo how do I execute sub commands as the current user and then continue the remainder of the script with sudo.
Prompting the user to enter his password again is not really practical as the script takes really long to execute and would require waiting 5-10 min for the prompt.
The easiest way is to run the subcommand via sudo from within the script. The user id to run with can be obtained by $SUDO_USER (look at the output of sudo env):
sudo -u $SUDO_USER ./exec_as_normal_user.sh
Instantiate the shell using
sudo -u $USER_NAME bash
and execute the shell script by calling,
./program.sh
I have a shell script which needs non-root user account to run certain commands and then change the user to root to run the rest of the script. I am using SUSE11.
I have used expect to automate the password prompt. But when I use
spawn su -
and the command gets executed, the prompt comes back with root and the rest of the script does not execute.
Eg.
< non-root commands>
spawn su -
<root commands>
But after su - the prompt returns back with user as root.
How to execute the remaining of the script.
The sudo -S option does not help as it does not run sudo -S ifconfig command which I need to find the IP address of the machine.
I have already gone through these links but could not find a solution:
Change script directory to user's homedir in a shell script
Changing unix user in a shell script
sudo will work here but you need to change your script a little bit:
$ cat 1.sh
id
sudo -s <<EOF
echo Now i am root
id
echo "yes!"
EOF
$ bash 1.sh
uid=1000(igor) gid=1000(igor) groups=1000(igor),29(audio),44(video),124(fuse)
Now i am root
uid=0(root) gid=0(root) groups=0(root)
yes!
You need to run your command in <<EOF block and give the block to sudo.
If you want, you can use su, of course. But you need to run it using expect/pexpect that will enter password for you.
But even in case you could manage to enter the password automatically (or switch it off) this construction would not work:
user-command
su
root-command
In this case root-command will be executed with user, not with root privileges, because it will be executed after su will be finished (su opens a new shell, not changes uid of the current shell). You can use the same trick here of course:
su -c 'sh -s' <<EOF
# list of root commands
EOF
But now you have the same as with sudo.
There is an easy way to do it without a second script. Just put this at the start of your file:
if [ "$(whoami)" != "root" ]
then
sudo su -s "$0"
exit
fi
Then it will automatically run itself as root. Of course, this assumes that you can sudo su without having to provide a password - but that's out of scope of this answer; see one of the other questions about using sudo in shell scripts for how to do that.
Short version: create a block to enclose all commands to be run as root.
For example, I created a script to run a command from a root subdirectory, the segment goes like this:
sudo su - <<EOF
cd rootSubFolder/subfolder
./commandtoRun
EOF
Also, note that if you are changing to "root" user inside a shell script like below one, few Linux utilities like awk for data extraction or defining even a simple shell variable etc will behave weirdly.
To resolve this simply quote the whole document by using <<'EOF' in place of EOF.
sudo -i <<'EOF'
ls
echo "I am root now"
EOF
The easiest way to do that would be to create a least two scripts.
The first one should call the second one with root privileges. So every command you execute in the second script would be executed as root.
For example:
runasroot.sh
sudo su-c'./scriptname.sh'
scriptname.sh
apt-get install mysql-server-5.5
or whatever you need.