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I have a script that , among other things, needs to do some stuff as root, like creating a mount folder. I tried:

echo "Linux user password is needed in order to ..."
sudo -s
# also tried:
# sudo su
... code that requires root permission
exit
... code that requires user permission

The problem is that the script stops after the "sudo -s" and continues only after I manually exit the automatically created root shell.

Is there a way to run root shell commands within a user script?

Thanks.

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Creating a mount folder does not require root-priviledges. If a user has write permissions to a folder he can create directories there. There is propably a better way without sudo or stuff like that. –  Nils Oct 17 '11 at 18:34
    
I agree with @Nils, but also... why don't you create a second script with all the functionality that needs root privileges? Then just call it with sudo from the first script. –  forcefsck Oct 18 '11 at 20:53

2 Answers 2

up vote 2 down vote

Yes, since things like

sudo mkdir /mnt/mymountpoint

work, you can do

sudo ./myrootscript.sh

and if you check for suitable parameters, your script could even call itself again, so you'd just have one file.

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1  
and if you needed to do it as a specific user, you can pass a -u $username to sudo. like sudo -u oracle lsnrctl start or something. –  Tim Kennedy Oct 17 '11 at 22:22
up vote 1 down vote

You are simply using both sudo and su in a wrong way. If you write just sudo -s or sudo su alone, you will end up with an interactive shell created from inside the script - this is what those comands do.

Since you need a chunk of shell code to be executed as root, you need to wrap it somehow into a single command. Probably the simplest way is to use an explicit subshell:

echo "Linux user password is needed in order to ..."
sudo sh -c '
 ... code that requires root permission
'

That, of course will cause trouble when you try to use some variables defined elsewhere in your script - in such case, use double quotes instead of single.

But if you only have several commands to be run as root, better use sudo in front of each of them.

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