Sudo Su automated login

Question

I want to automate the login process with sudo su. I have seen lot of questions on these, but none of them are working for me.

Automate login with sudo and su

Here's my what I tried so far

echo "mypassword" | sudo -S su - user
echo "mypassword\n" | sudo -S su - user
echo mypassword | sudo -S su - user
echo "mypassword" | sudo -S su user
echo mypassword | sudo -S su user

I am just getting the below response

-bash: line 1: mypassword: command not found

My Bash version

GNU bash, version 4.1.2(1)-release (x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu) 
Copyright (C) 2009 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

As a note, my password contains special character @

@ sudo
usage: sudo [-D level] -h | -K | -k | -V
usage: sudo -v [-AknS] [-D level] [-g groupname|#gid] [-p prompt] [-u user name|#uid]
usage: sudo -l[l] [-AknS] [-D level] [-g groupname|#gid] [-p prompt] [-U user name] [-u user name|#uid] [-g groupname|#gid] [command]
usage: sudo [-AbEHknPS] [-r role] [-t type] [-C fd] [-D level] [-g groupname|#gid] [-p prompt] [-u user name|#uid] [-g groupname|#gid] [VAR=value] [-i|-s] [<command>]
usage: sudo -e [-AknS] [-r role] [-t type] [-C fd] [-D level] [-g groupname|#gid] [-p prompt] [-u user name|#uid] file ...

Answer 1

Do not do that! That will leave your password in your shell's history!

If you really have to do that, what I recommend is that you configure your sudoers file to allow a passwordless login.

To do that, run the command sudo visudo and add a line like this one:

reddy ALL=NOPASSWD: /bin/su - *

(where reddy would be your username).

If you need to give this access to the whole team, create a (UNIX) group with the team, and replace reddy with %team (the team group).

(Also, a little off-topic: the echo command already adds the \n you needed. If you actually wanted the opposite (which you don't), the command would be echo -n.)

Answer 2

I agree with Valmiky that you're going about it the wrong way, but the sudoers line there isn't what I'd recommend. With his line, you are all authorized to sudo to anybody else including root without password. This effectively gives you full access to the server, meaning that the /bin/su part of the line is redundant.

If you should only be able to sudo to this one particular user without giving your password, the correct line should be

%team ALL = (user) NOPASSWD: ALL

Now you can run anything as that user without giving a password, while e.g. anything requiring you to sudo to root will still require a password.

You can now in your .bashrc do

 sudo -u user /bin/bash