How to successfully su another user and run his scripts

[yalin zhao]

Hi friends,

I want to write a simple script with following purpose:

I want User A su User B
User A will run a script in User B's directory.

$ ll test
-rwxrwxrwx 1 ssprod sybase 86 Nov 8 14:07 test


This is what I wrote in a file "test"

"su - UserB -c /UserB/octacom/sqllist.sh
When I run it, nother happens. But If I run manually by su UserB and run it in UserB's diectory, it will work.
Can anyone give me suggestions?

Thanks

Yalin

[Christopher McCray_1]

Hello,

Try this instead:

su - UserB -c "/UserB/octacom/sqllist.sh
Hope this helps

Chris

[Jeff Schussele]

Hi,

The quotes need to surround the -c command string - not the entire command.

Rgds,
Jeff

[Pete Randall]

Why not just change the permissions on the script?

Pete

[yalin zhao]

I changed it to the following:

su - UserB -c "/UserB/octacom/sqqlist.sh" su - UserB -c "/UserB/octacom/sqqlist.sh
none of them works

Note: I changed the permission of the scripts
to 777.
the "Any suggestions or any other way that we can do this?

[Ken Hubnik_2]

su - userid. The - set the environment for that user. runs .profile

[Pete Randall]

If the permissions are 777, then why do you need to su to User B? User A can run the script as himself.

Pete

[Martin Johnson]

AFAIK, the password must be entered interactively. I tried this a couple of months back and was not able to get it to work. My work around was to submit an "at" job instead.

HTH
Marty

[Christopher McCray_1]

Another thing,

Are you calling this pwd file by it's absolute path or are you just calling the file name?

You either have to do this:


su - UserB -c "/UserB/octacom/sqllist.sh
or

PWD=/full/path/to/pwd
.
.
.
su - UserB -c "/UserB/octacom/sqllist.sh <$PWD"

Hope this helps

Chris

[Jeff Schussele]

You're not going to be able to pass the password to the su command that way. I suggest you take Pete's advice & set the perms such that UserA can run the script.

Your other option would be for UserB to setup a .rhosts file that gives UserA equivalency rights to UserB.

Rgds,
Jeff

[A. Clay Stephenson · Accepted solution]

You have a more fundamental problem. The su - rather than simply su is killing you. You want to source the user's .profile but almost certainly .profile expects an interactive (i.e. a terminal for stdin). Commands like stty, tset, and tabs will hang if stdin is not a tty device.

There are two ways to make this work:
1) surround any of the commands which deal with the terminal with
if [ -t 0 ]
then
tset ....
stty ....
tabs ...
fi

-t 0 is true if stdin (0) is a terminal device.

2) better
have a file that both .profile and your script sources (e.g) . /usr/local/bin/myenv.sh

myenv.sh would then set and export any needed vars.

There should be no exits or returns in this file.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

I just saw where you want a non-root user to be able to do this. NO way - it would be an unbelieable security hole if possible. What you can do is setup a sudo command. You can get sudo from:
http://gatekeep.cs.utah.edu/hppd/hpux/Sysadmin/sudo-1.6.6/

[Gerhard Roets]

I use that su method on bootup in my rc scripts. I have a special Daemon user. Who runs network daemons i.e the cognos license manager. I do not want to run them as root, and the way described above is the way I do it with the only exception being that i nohup it.

/bin/nohup /bin/su - phlmgrd -c '/opt/cognos/license1/lmgrd /opt/cognos/license1/lmgrd.log2> /opt/cognos/license1/lmgrd.err & '

Regards
Gerhard