My question is how to, in a script, su to a user.
For simple example:

Ran as root., so I dont have to worry bout entering a password, for now. Want to figure this out first.

#!/bin/bash
su zero
cd /home/zero
ls
exit 0

It does su to user zero but then does not execute anything after that point. Why? Is there a special way of doing this that im missing.

Hi.

When you do su, another instance of bash is launched, so the script never gets to the next line (until the su'ed instance of bash returns). There is a -c option for su which allows you to pass a single command to the su'ed instance of bash, which might be useful (I don't know if that single command actually does have to be one command, or whether you could string a load of commands onto one line. If not, you could just create a seperate script and put the commands you need to execute after the su into that). See 'man su' for enlightenment.

Dave

Thx, I checked the man page for su and there was no listing for what args could be but I did find that -c option on the net. It is possible to do more than one command like:
su user -c "
command
command
etc..
"
But if you do anything with qoutes it end's it. But executing the second script is a good idea. Funny, the simplist things I never think of!
Thanks alot Dave!

Maybe I should of wrote this in c++... ... oh well, least im learning something new.

You can escape any characters that you want to pass directly to the -c option by putting \ in front of them:

e.g.
su -c "echo "who" > /home/dave/out; grep who /home/dave/out" doesn't work, but
su -c "echo \"who\" > /home/dave/out; grep who /home/dave/out" does.

Dave

sudo does what you want but itakes just one command.
If you need a bunch of things done, use that command to invoke a shell script that does the stuff you want.