How do I use su to execute the rest of the bash script as that user?

I've written a script that takes, as an argument, a string that is a concatenation of a username and a project. The script is supposed to switch (su) to the username, cd to a specific directory based upon the project string.

I basically want to do:

su $USERNAME;  
cd /home/$USERNAME/$PROJECT;  
svn update;  

The problem is that once I do an su... it just waits there. Which makes sense since the flow of execution has passed to switching to the user. Once I exit, then the rest of the things execute but it doesn't work as desired.

I prepended su to the svn command but the command failed (i.e. it didn't update svn in the directory desired).

How do I write a script that allows the user to switch user and invoke svn (among other things)?

Solution 1:

Much simpler: use sudo to run a shell and use a heredoc to feed it commands.

#!/usr/bin/env bash
whoami
sudo -i -u someuser bash << EOF
echo "In"
whoami
EOF
echo "Out"
whoami

(answer originally on SuperUser)

Solution 2:

The trick is to use "sudo" command instead of "su"

You may need to add this

username1 ALL=(username2) NOPASSWD: /path/to/svn

to your /etc/sudoers file

and change your script to:

sudo -u username2 -H sh -c "cd /home/$USERNAME/$PROJECT; svn update" 

Where username2 is the user you want to run the SVN command as and username1 is the user running the script.

If you need multiple users to run this script, use a %groupname instead of the username1