su root
 

Do you mean log in as root by using

$ su -

cmiiw

Inside of a shell script, you might use "sudo"?

Is the question (& this is a guess) something like:

'If I write a script that, at some point in its execution, needs to do some stuff as root, and I want the script to run without user intervention, I have to code the root password into the script and that seems like a very bad thing. How do I work around that?'

...or not?

My question would be almost exactly the same as you formulation. Has anyone an answer?