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up vote 7 down vote favorite

I have sudo rights on a redhat box; once I've "sudo su -" to become root in a shell, are there any commands I can run to see what username I su'd FROM?

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2 Answers

up vote 8 down vote accepted

The shell's parent process is su, so you need to find out the user running su's parent process:

ps -o user= $(ps -o ppid= $PPID)

But you shouldn't be doing sudo su - if your version of sudo is not too old to have sudo -i. Sudo sets the environment variable SUDO_USER to the name of the user who ran sudo. You won't see it with sudo su - because su - scrubs the environment.

$ sudo -i
# echo $SUDO_USER
gilles
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And sudo -si gives you a shell with SUDO_USER set. – bahamat Jan 27 '11 at 23:11
@bahamat: Just sudo -i gives you a shell. In fact: sudo: you may not specify both the `-i' and `-s' options – Gilles Jan 27 '11 at 23:13
Yes, you're right. That wasn't in the man page, but when executed that's the message that comes out. – bahamat Jan 29 '11 at 17:03
up vote 2 down vote

Run command "who am i" it will return you something like that:

**gladimdim** tty2        2011-01-27 23:54 (:0)

In bold "gladimdim" is the user which was initially logged to system.

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who am i is not a command on my system, and whoami returns "root" – phunehehe Jan 27 '11 at 23:20
On my system it works: whoami returns 'root', who am i returns my username – rubik Jan 28 '11 at 16:57
@rubik That's just because it's the who command. – Chris Down Nov 7 '11 at 14:00

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