su options - running command as another user

Question

I was wondering how to run a command as another user from a script.

I have the script's owner set as root. I also have the following command being run within the script to run the command as the hudson user:

su -c command hudson

Is this the correct syntax?

Answer 1

Yes. Here's the --help:

oli@bert:~$ su --help
Usage: su [options] [LOGIN]

Options:
  -c, --command COMMAND         pass COMMAND to the invoked shell
  -h, --help                    display this help message and exit
  -, -l, --login                make the shell a login shell
  -m, -p,
  --preserve-environment        do not reset environment variables, and
                                keep the same shell
  -s, --shell SHELL             use SHELL instead of the default in passwd

And some testing (I used sudo as I don't know the password for the nobody account)

oli@bert:~$ sudo su -c whoami nobody
[sudo] password for oli: 
nobody

Answer 2

Note: "I have the script's owner set as root" doesn't do anything; even if you have the setuid bit set it still doesn't work

---

Assuming you're actually running the script as root, however, you can use sudo. su is primarily for switching users, while sudo is for executing commands as other users. The -u flag lets you specify which user to execute the command as:

sudo -u hudson command