How to run a command as a specific user in an init script

Question

I m writing an init script which is supposed to execute a single command as a user different than root  This is how I m doing it currently  sudo -u username command   This generally works as expected on Ubuntu Debian  but on RHEL the script which is executed as the command hangs  Is there another way to run the command as another user   Note that I can t use lsb init functions as they re not available on RHEL Centos 5 x

User · Answer

Adding this answer as I had to lookup multiple places to achieve my use case. I had a script that runs on startup. This script runs process as a specific (passwordless) user and is running on multiple linux flavors. Here are options on different flavors: (I have taken java as target process for example)

1. RHEL / CentOS 6:

source /etc/rc.d/init.d/functions
daemon --user=myUser $JAVA_HOME/bin/java

2. RHEL 7 / SUSE12 / other linux flavors where systemd is used:

In your systemd unit file add:

User=myUser

3. Suse 11:

/sbin/startproc -u myUser $JAVA_HOME/bin/java

User · Answer

On RHEL systems  the  etc rc d init d functions script is intended to provide similar to what you want  If you source that at the top of your init script  all of it s functions become available   The specific function provided to help with this is daemon  If you are intending to use it to start a daemon-like program  a simple usage would be   daemon --user username command   If that is too heavy-handed for what you need  there is runuser  see man runuser for full info  some versions may need -u prior to the username     sbin runuser username -s  bin bash -c  command s  to run as user username

User · Answer

I usually do it the way that you are doing it  i e  sudo -u username command    But  there is also the  djb  way to run a daemon with privileges of another user   See  http   thedjbway b0llix net daemontools uidgid html

User · Answer

For systemd style init scripts it s really easy  You just add a User  in the  Service  section   Here is an init script I use for qbittorrent-nox on CentOS 7    Unit  Description qbittorrent torrent server   Service  User  lt username gt  ExecStart  usr bin qbittorrent-nox Restart on-abort   Install  WantedBy multi-user target

User · Answer

Instead of sudo  try  su - username command   In my experience  sudo is not always available on RHEL systems  but su is  because su is part of the coreutils package whereas sudo is in the sudo package

User · Answer

If you have start-stop-daemon  start-stop-daemon --start --quiet -u username -g usergroup --exec command

[linux] How to run a command as a specific user in an init script?

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