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I created a "system" user in Ubuntu 11.04 (adduser --system) for running certain cron jobs, but sometimes I want to test things out by manually running commands as that user. What's the easiest way to do this?

su doesn't work, because the user has /bin/false as its shell (which is fine for cron). I've been manually changing the shell to /bin/bash to do my testing and then changing it back again, but I wonder is there an easier way?

7ochem
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EMP
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2 Answers2

55

I use su - targetuser -s /bin/bash from a root shell.

For direct command execution use -c:

su - targetuser -s /bin/bash -c "/bin/echo hello world"
Tombart
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dmourati
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2

Use sudo. This will work even if the user doesn't have a real shell.

eirescot
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