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Automate execution of shell script owned by non-root user at booting

Posted June 5th, 2009 by gnulinux

Hi all, This is really going to be useful. many times we need to execute some commands or shell scripts as non-root user at the time of booting. say for example you need to mount samba share to be mounted as non-root user at time of system boot. Many people do argue that why you need to mount share as non-root user ... A good answer for that argument is, not all applications are running as root user on server. For security reasons it is a good practice to have different non-root users as owner of different applications.

Follow these steps to execute a single command as non-root user at time of bootinig in unix/linux.

  1. edit your rc.local script as this is the script which will be execute immediately after booting. usually it is available under /etc/ directory. type following line of command to mount a external samba share as non-root user.

    su - {userid} -c {COMMAND}

    If you think you have more arguments in your command line or you have more then 1 command to be executed then put them alltogether in one shell script and then use

    su - {userid} -s {shell-script}

    e.g. you need to mount two mounts on single linux servers and those two mounts are on different servers then your shell-script called myscript will become something like. also it is good idea to keep that script in users home directory or in a directory which is accessible by that non-root user other wise it will not work.


      #!/bin/bash
      /usr/bin/smbmount //{first server name OR IP address}/{share name} {first local path to mount} -o username,password rw
      /usr/bin/smbmount //{second server name OR IP address}/{share name} {second local path to mount} -o username,password rw
      exit;

    And for this case your entry in /etc/rc.local will be

    su - {non-root-user} -s {/home/non-root-user/myscript}

Make sure that non root user have valid shell available other wise this will not work

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