How can I sudo su and change directory just after?

Question

I would like to create an alias that does something like this:

alias userYYY='sudo su userYYY; cd /a/path/that/only/userYYY/has/access'

So then from my command line, I am logged in with a sudo user, and I would like to type the alias userYYY so that my shell is now logged with userYYY and pwd is /a/path/that/only/userYYY/has/access.

How can I do that? This userYYY is for running some processes, and there must be anything in its home. Hence, I tried changing its $HOME using:

sudo usermod -m -d /a/path/that/only/userYYY/has/access userYYY 

And then from my shell with my sudoer file I did sudo su userYYY. But that didn't work. The only that worked was sudo su -l userYYYY but that opened a new bash inside my original shell (-bash-4.1$ ....).

In summary, what I want is to simply avoid having to write 2 lines in my shell:

sudo su userYYY
cd /a/path/that/only/userYYY/has/access

Any ideas?

Answer 1

alias userYYY='sudo su userYYY -c "cd /a/path/that/only/userYYY/has/access; /bin/bash"'

Answer 2

One option would be to edit ~/.bashrc of the target user, and add cd there:

cd /a/path/that/only/userYYY/has/access

Answer 3

I know this is slightly different than the original question, but the idea is to run the command as a different user without typing in a password when policy prohibits sudo su <user> -c.

sudo -u userYYY -- sh -c "cd /a/path/that/only/userYYY/has/access; /bin/bash"

Answer 4

Short answer - you can't. The sudo su starts a new shell which must exit before it gets to the cd command.

Answer 5

For me a combination of sudo and screen worked out:

sudo -iu vagrant screen -mS npm_install bash -c 'cd /vagrant && npm install'

This command first switches to the vagrant user. Then as vagrant changes the directory to /vagrant and executes npm install.