sudo to a different user and run command as that user

shell sudo user-profile login-script .profile
user1874594 picture user1874594 · Feb 12, 2014 · Viewed 12.5k times · Source

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.

Answer

chepner picture chepner · Feb 12, 2014

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.

Related questions

sudo echo "something" >> /etc/privilegedFile doesn't work

This is a pretty simple question, at least it seems like it should be, about sudo permissions in Linux. There are a lot of times when I just want to append something to /etc/hosts or a similar file but …

Read More
Use sudo without password INSIDE a script

For some reason I need, as user, to run without sudo a script script.sh which needs root privileges to work. I saw as the only solution to put sudo INSIDE script.sh. Let's take an example : script.sh : #!/bin/…

Read More
How do I edit /etc/sudoers from a script?

I need to edit /etc/sudoers from a script to add/remove stuff from white lists. Assuming I have a command that would work on a normal file, how could I apply it to /etc/sudoers? Can I copy and …

Read More