UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

A work around to logging in as the user w/o a password would be to use ssh with key-based authentication (although sudo is the preferred method).

Copy the public key for your user account to the authorized_keys file for prdusr.

Then run 'ssh prduser@localhost' as your user account. This will open an ssh session as the user and bypass the password prompt.

sudo is as dangerous as you make it. (sudo passwd, anyone?) Unless his sysadmin's completely crazy he'd have restricted sudo to only allow one or a handful of users to do this.

Thank you autocross.us for the ssh authentication suggestion. I saw that from my google search for this the other day so I will certainly keep that in mind for future.

This is just an old Solaris HP box that will be replaced in the near future and only a handful of programmers like myself are maintaining old sas applications on it.

So at the moment only root and myself can do this.

The original answer to my initial question was to eliminate prdusr password prompt altogether so limiting just myself and root to be able to su prdusr without the password prompt is a very good compromise for now as I switch to prdusr a lot during my work to submit/check jobs and monitor processes on the old box.

We have a sas problem that generate orphaned processes running forever daily.

I wrote a korn script to detect and auto kill these jobs but it only works partially by looking at very high CPU and no updates to saswork directories. But people can run very high cpu sas jobs without sort (updating their saswork directories) so my script is flawed. And now we are back to manual checking and emailing individual first before killing their jobs.

Just want to say, that the ssh authentication route is the probably the better route to go.

I implemented this and it works sometimes only and not always. I don't know what the problem is.

piping the from file into sudo -S kill -9 process-id doesn't work in an alias. I still get password prompts. Implementing that in a batch korn script works sometimes but not always.