Shell Programming and Scripting

Is is possible switch user from a non-root user to root user without entering the password interactively inside a korn shell script which is run by a non-root user?

e.g. I have a non-root user called infodba who is in dba group and I want to create a shell script which is executed by infodba user and inside the script I want to switch to root user without getting prompted for the password and run chmod 777 command against a directory then switch back to infodba and create a file inside the directory. I like to perform the below in one script run by infodba without getting prompted for password.

(1) TEST_DIR exists with the access below
ls -ld TEST_DIR
drwxrwxr-x 2 root sys 80 Nov 20 10:45 TEST_DIR

(2) Give full access to TEST_DIR by root
chmod 777 TEST_DIR
ls -ld TEST_DIR
drwxrwxrwx 2 root sys 80 Nov 20 10:46 TEST_DIR

(3) Create a file inside TEST_DIR using infodba
touch TEST_DIR/test.txt

Cheers
Steve

Unix version : HP-UX 11.11

sudo looks like the tool for you (or RBAC if HPUX supports it).

BTW, I would suggest that you don't set world permisions If you absolutely must give world permissions (and there's hardly ever a good time to do this), the sticky bit to protect the files within it.

I agree that you need sudo. This way you don't need to switch user, you can give that user permissions to run xxx program with yz switches. The command then turns into

sudo chmod 777 /some/directory

This prevents that user from running it with any other perms and allows you to keep the root password sacred.

Here it is from the software porting place:
sudo-1.6.8p12

You'll need to edit the config file.

Enjoy!

Smiling Dragon,
Thanks for your advice.

Is there a way to do this only using standard HP-UX commands without using any tools?

Steve

Sorry, I'm not familiar enough with HPUX to know, sudo is widely used though (and is included with some unix distributions) , you don't need to fear that it's too wierd or unsupported for use in an enterprise environment.

You can download Sudo from HP rather than going outside. It's in the HP-UX Internet Express for HP-UX 11i v1 product, available off Hewlett-Packard Co..