In rc.local I have added some commands to run programs in their own screen, using commands similar to the following:

/usr/bin/screen -dmS screenname ./executable-file

However all these screens run as the root user. If I login as a different user and type the same command in manually, the screen is assigned to that user only, and screen -ls only shows the user's own screen, not the others running under root's session. What I would like to do is run some of the screens at startup, as a user other than root. Is this possible, and if so how? I've read the screen manual page but it doesn't really help.

The reason I want to do this is that when the server boots up, it needs to run all the programs, however if certain users log in via SSH, I only want them to see the screens for the programs that belong to them.

Why not just put the commands into the user's .profiles so that it starts when they login rather than at bootup?

Adding something like:

exec command

To the end of the user's .profile will make it start "command" (which of course would be whatever application you wanted) and REPLACE the shell it started from so that when they exit the application they automatically logout. (You do it that way because simply putting in "command" without the "exec" would make it start automatically but on exit they would go to the shell prompt.)

The software has to load up at startup - it's basically a database which runs client/server which they connect to over the web using TCP/IP, however the database server has to be running for them to connect to it, and it should be running all the time from startup. However there may be times when they need to SSH in to restart the program or do an upgrade, and if there are several versions of the program running for different people, I don't want one person being able to see a list of screens for everyone else's databases, as they would then be able to go into those screens and close down the applications. I hope that makes some kind of sense!

Have you tried:

su - username -c "/usr/bin/screen -dmS screenname ./executable-file"

where username is the name of the user you want to have run the screen? (You may have to put in full path of "executable-file" instead of "./")

1 members found this post helpful.

Thanks jlightner,

This worked like a charm in a case where I was trying to do the same thing as OP.