Re: Run script as root without sudo

The man page is very confusing. Yes, it says -c is class. But it also 
has examples like this:

  su -m operator -c 'shutdown -p now'



In my testing, this works:

$ su - root -c 'date'
Thu Aug 19 08:31:53 UTC 2021

and this does not:

$ su - root 'date'
date: No such file or directory.


What is -c supposed to do?


Ari







On 19/8/21 6:21pm, Andriy Gapon wrote:
> On 2021-08-19 08:31, Aristedes Maniatis via freebsd-stable wrote:
>> I've got some scripts which are intended to run on a new EC2 instance
>> right after it is created. Since the script needs to install packages it
>> need to run as root. But because I don't have sudo installed at this
>> point (it is a brand new instance), I've only got 'su' to get root.
>>
>> The script itself is launched over SSH with the ec2-user account and
>> there is no root password at this point in the startup.
>>
>> My first attempt was to put this inside the script itself:
>>
>> if ["$($whoami)" !="root" ];thenexec su -c"$0" exit1 fi
>>
>>
>> But su complains that I'm not allowed to execute a command using the -c
>> option as root.
> -c option seems to be so confusing for some reason that it should bein
> some FAQ document.
>
>  From the man page:
>       -c class
>               Use the settings of the specified login class.  The login class
>               must be defined in login.conf(5).  Only allowed for the super-
>               user.
>
> You surely though that it did something else, right?
>  From the man page again:
>       If the optional args are provided on the command line, they are
> passed to
>       the login shell of the target login.  Note that all command line
>       arguments before the target login name are processed by su itself,
>       everything after the target login name gets passed to the login shell.
>
>> How else can I get this script running as root remotely in a completely
>> unattended way?
>