How to run a program as a different user?

Guru3 · 11-04-2003, 08:25 AM

Say I'm logged in as root, but I want to run a program as a normal user, because that's the only way it will run, and I don't want to log out then log back in again. Yes, I know I could do ALT+F2 or something and go to a different terminal, but that's logging in again, and my password is difficult to type, so I don't want to do that. Is there some trick to running a program as a different user?

djtoltz · 11-04-2003, 08:40 AM

from root, you can "su" to any user you want without needing a password.

e.g. "su admin", hit enter, and you're admin. If you need admin's environment, use "su - admin".

Finally, if you just want to run one command as "admin", you can use;
su -c "somecommand <arguments>" admin

... which will run somecommand as user admin then return.

Use "man su" for more details on how to use the "set user" command.

linuxbotx · 11-04-2003, 08:55 AM

Or you could log in as your user, go to a console in X, type su and run that app as root. But why would you want to change users??? Its not very secure. Now, you will have to run some apps as root, but constantly changing users is stupid.

But to answer your question, create an icon on your desktop to run the app. Right click on the icon, click properties. Click on the tab called execute
click on the checkbox called "Run as differen't user" and type in the username in the little text box under it.

Guru3 · 11-04-2003, 11:59 AM

Ok, thanks for your reply. The reason I ask this is in RH9 there is /etc/rc.local which runs programs at startup. Unfortunately it runs them as root so I need to set it to run them as a regular user, because some programs don't recomend being run by root/won't be run by root.

Guru3 · 11-04-2003, 12:35 PM

I got this

Quote:

You'd use 'su -c "..." <user>' for rc.local.

Does this answer your question?

Also, to make it easier to deal with quotes and such, it's generally easier to write a script that requires no arguments and passes required arguments to the program, does redirection, etc. You then call the script with su -c <scriptname> <user> and let the script do all the setup, redirection, etc. which is already running as <user>.

from djtoltz in an e-mail and it worked perfectly! Thanks!