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I want to change ownership, group membership and access rights in a script by a sequence of commands.

Some of them need root permissions.

I first did sudo su in a terminal and then ran all the necessary commands once in a row. I found out that after sudo su all macro definitions abc=<...> have to be put after sudo su, because it seems that root does not know about macros existing in the other context.

After all my commands worked as expected, I called histoy, removed the line numbers and framed the relevant part of it in sudo su ... exit.

I can paste this sequence of commands into a terminal and it runs fine.

However if I prepend it with a line #!/bin/bash and store it as a file and make that executable, that does not work:

I get prompted for the password, but then I end up at a command line level, with the prompt ending in #, which shows me that sudo su has worked. But the rest of my command sequence has not worked.

How can I achieve the other commands to be executed?

Being a command line newbie, I guess I haven't understood something important yet. Please explain how to do it and why.

Adalbert Hanßen
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    Don't use sudo inside scripts. Instead, run the entire script as root. If it's a cronjob, run it from root's crontab. – Artur Meinild Sep 01 '21 at 13:47
  • Artur, do you suggest to put sudo -u <username> in front of all non-privileged commands and run the whole script as sudo xyz.sz? This however contradicts your first advice to never use sudo within a script. – Adalbert Hanßen Sep 01 '21 at 14:28
  • I didn't say never, I said "don't". But the one example you give would be the exception, and that could be viable in some cases. ;-) – Artur Meinild Sep 01 '21 at 18:56

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