Use sudo without password INSIDE a script

From my blog: IDMRockstar.com:

The kicker is that sometimes, I need to run commands as root. Here's the quick and dirty way I accomplish that without divulging the passwords:

#! /bin/bashread -s -p "Enter Password for sudo: " sudoPWecho $sudoPW | sudo -S yum update

This way the user is prompted for the password (and hidden from terminal) and then passed into commands as needed, so I'm not running the entire script as root =)

If you have a better, way, I'd love to hear it! I'm not a shell scripting expert by any means.

Cheers!

.: Adam

If you want to run sudo /usr/bin/apt-get update without a password, you need to have the sudoers entry:

user ALL=(ALL:ALL) NOPASSWD:/usr/bin/apt-get update

For the larger issue of the script as a whole, there are two possible approaches:

Approach 1

For each command in the script that needs sudo, create a line in sudoers specifically for that command. In this case, the script can be called normally:

./script1.sh

Approach 2

Place a line in sudoers for the script as a whole. When this is done, the individual commands do not need sudo. However, sudo must be used to start the script as in:

sudo ./script.sh

If your password isn't something you want to be very secure about, (maybe some testing server in the company etc.) you can elevate to sudo in the script via echo like:

echo YourPasswordHere | sudo -S Command

The prompt still prints the "enter password" text to output though. So don't expect it to be neat.

See this Askubuntu post