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I am trying to change user in order to execute a specific command during startup. It fails silently and apparently the userchange isn't carried out as I can tell that the command isn't executed.

What am I doing wrong in my below shown initscript? 

respawn
console none

start on startup
stop on shutdown

script
  su -u anotheruser -c "myCommand" >> "myLogfile.log"
end script
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You could also use cron, i.e. a crontab @reboot entry, I suppose. (Output will be sent via mail.) – sr_ Feb 24 '12 at 10:05

2 Answers

up vote 3 down vote accepted

I'm assuming you are running recent version of ubuntu or a distribution based on upstart. You can check /var/log/daemon.log for errors.

The standard su takes the syntax su [options] [username]. Checkout man 1 su. You might want to try :

su -c "myCommand" anotheruser >> "myLogfile.log"

Also, a couple of things would happen (mostly not desirable)

  1. myLogfile.log would be owned by root.
  2. myLogfile.log would be created on / (root directory) if you don't use an absolute path like /tmp/myLogfile.log (because upstart runs with pwd set to /).

If you want the file to be owned by anotheruser you might switch the command to.

su -c "myCommand >> /tmp/myLogfile.log" anotheruser

This might cause problems if you have leftover myLogfile.log owned by root from earlier runs or if have not changed myLogfile.log to something like /tmp/myLogfile.log (normally, regular users can't create files on root dir /).

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The ownership or permissions of myLogfile.log might be the issue. Be aware that root might have a stricter umask, and the permissions of myLogfile.log would then disallow writes. – Bruce Ediger Feb 24 '12 at 13:22
up vote 2 down vote

It looks like you've mixed up the syntax of su and sudo.

su -c 'mycommand' anotheruser
sudo -u anotheruser 'mycommand'
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