can I run 'su' in the middle of a bash script?

Question

can I change/su user in the middle of a script?

if [ \"$user\" == \"\" ]; then
  echo \"Enter the table name\";
  read user
fi

gunzip *
chown postgres *
su pos         


        

Answer 1

Another interesting idea that I heard today is to do a recursive call on the script, when you run as root and you want to run the script as another user. See the example below:

I am running script "my_script" as "root" and want the script to run as user "raamee"

---

#!/bin/bash

#Script name is: my_script

user=`whoami`

if [ "$user" == "root" ]; then
  # As suggested by glenn jackman. Since I don't have anything to run once 
  # switching the user, I can modify the next line to: 
  # exec sudo -u raamee my_script and reuse the same process
  sudo -u raamee my_script
fi

if [ "$user" == "raamee" ]; then
  #put here the commands you want to perform
  do_command_1
  do_command_2
  do_command_3
fi