Remove sudo permissions for one command - bash

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

Related

Usage of sudo in a shell script

When executing a shell script, how does sudo come into play in the following?
# script.sh
ls /root
sudo ls /root
Now, if I run $ sudo ./script.sh or $ ./script.sh what will be the difference? For example:
Do all commands that are run with sudo ./script.sh automatically prepend a "sudo" to that command?
Is the sudo ls /root line vlid? Or should the line instead of ls /root and require root invocation?
Basically, I'm trying to figure out the difference in a line-item being run as sudo, or the script itself being run as sudo.
If you have a script that requires elevated privileges for certain commands, one way to handle those commands is with sudo. Before using sudo, there are several considerations for configuring its use. For instance, if you have certain users you want to be able to run commands with sudo and further to run sudo without being prompted for a password, you need a bit of configuration first. sudo is configured through the visudo utility. For most uses of sudo you will simply need to uncomment options at the end of the file. However to allow users to run sudo without a password, you will also need to add those users to the wheel group (some distros now use a sudo group -- check). After adding users to the wheel group, to allow them to use sudo without a password, you would run visudo and uncomment the following line:
## Same thing without a password
%wheel ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL
With sudo configured, then within a script, if elevated (root) privileges are needed you simply need to check whether the user UID (and/or EUID) are equal to zero indicating the user is root, if not, then you use sudo to run the command. You can structure the test in the negative or in the positive to fit your taste, e.g.
if [ "$UID" -eq 0 -o "$EUID" -eq 0 ]; then
command
else
sudo command
fi
or
if [ "$UID" -ne 0 -a "$EUID" -ne 0 ]; then
sudo command
else
command
fi
If your command is not a simple command, but instead contains redirections or pipelines, then you must run the entire command with sudo not just the first command in the list. To do so, just use sudo bash -c "your long command" to ensure elevated privileges are available to each part of a compound command that needs it. For example if you attempt:
sudo cat /etc/sudoers > sudoersbackup
The command will fail. While cat has the elevated privileges to read the file the > redirection is run as the regular user and will fail due to lack of permission. To handle that circumstance, you can do:
sudo bash -c "cat /etc/sudoers > sudoersbackup"
That ensures elevated privileges are available to the entire command.
SUDO stands for "super user do". Basically it is a keyword that when prefixed before any other command, will force that command to run with elevated privileges. Certain commands require elevated privileges. There should be a file located at /etc/sudoers which provides a list of users or user groups who have permission to execute privileged commands.
So if your shell script requires no special privileges to run (which I expect it does not), then sudo ./script.sh should be equivalent to bash script.sh or ./script.sh.

Run a command as the standard user, from a sudo elevated script

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.

Need to use sudo su - in Unix shell script

I am at beginner level and I need to use sudo su - and pwd in one command line in script for two different users. (I'm using pwd as an example; the specific command is not important.)
And I am using command sudo su - user -c pwd. This command works when switching to one user, but not when switching to another.
For example:-
$ sudo su - ora -c pwd
/oracle/
$ sudo su - adm -c pwd
Sorry, user myuser is not allowed to execute '/usr/bin/su - adm -c pwd' as root on server.
$
How can I make it work for 'adm' user too?
sudo is used to run a command as somebody else.
By default it runs a command as root.
You can also supply the -u option to run a command as another user.
You really shouldn't need to use sudo and su together as they do similar jobs.
Sudo does this job in a much more controlled and configurable fashion.
Sudo can be configured to control:
Who can use it.
What commands they can run.
Who they can run them as.
Whether they need to supply their password when doing so.
You can only run one command at a time, so if you need to do several things together you will need to write a script. Alternatively you can chain them together in a one liner. Or finally you can run a shell as the user you require. e.g.:
sudo bash
I think in your case you probably want to use:
sudo -u adm anycommand

sudo to a different user and run command as that user

consider this sudo command below
sudo -iu bigadmin
bigadmin is a generic user that all users sudo to, to do stuff with privileged access.
Now the problem is it a shared user like I mentioned. So any kind of profile customization isn't gonna work .
What I am trying to do is for the sessions I establish- I want to run a script that has all my variables inside. so when I sudo it should do these things
sudo -iu bigadmin ; . ./mycustomshell.sh
How's this best done.
First, make sure that all the variables in mycustomshell.sh are exported. Then, source it first, then run sudo -iu bigadmin, so that the shell started by sudo inherits the variables exported by mycustomshell.
Another option is to invoke bash as
sudo -iu bigadmin bash --rcfile mycustomshell.sh
However, this causes bash to ignore .bashrc, so you may want to source .bashrc explicitly at the beginning of mycustomershell.sh to compensate.
This bash command useful for a shell script. It runs a sudo password that given as parameter, and add a line at the end of given file.
echo $password | echo 'net.ipv4.ping_group_range=0 2147483647' | sudo -S tee -a /etc/sysctl.conf

Applying sudo to some commands in script

I have a bash script that partially needs to be running with default user rights, but there are some parts that involve using sudo (like copying stuff into system folders) I could just run the script with sudo ./script.sh, but that messes up all file access rights, if it involves creating or modifying files in the script.
So, how can I run script using sudo for some commands? Is it possible to ask for sudo password in the beginning (when the script just starts) but still run some lines of the script as a current user?
You could add this to the top of your script:
while ! echo "$PW" | sudo -S -v > /dev/null 2>&1; do
read -s -p "password: " PW
echo
done
That ensures the sudo credentials are cached for 5 minutes. Then you could run the commands that need sudo, and just those, with sudo in front.
Edit: Incorporating mklement0's suggestion from the comments, you can shorten this to:
sudo -v || exit
The original version, which I adapted from a Python snippet I have, might be useful if you want more control over the prompt or the retry logic/limit, but this shorter one is probably what works well for most cases.
Each line of your script is a command line. So, for the lines you want, you can simply put sudo in front of those lines of your script. For example:
#!/bin/sh
ls *.h
sudo cp *.h /usr/include/
echo "done" >>log
Obviously I'm just making stuff up. But, this shows that you can use sudo selectively as part of your script.
Just like using sudo interactively, you will be prompted for your user password if you haven't done so recently.

Resources