Login as non-root user in terminal

This is a question that I would expect to quickly get an answer from google. However somehow google is failing me. Let's assume I'm logged in to a terminal session and I would like temporarily work as another non-root user whose password I know without leaving my session. When logged as this user I want the home directory, etc, for this user set up correctly until I log out. How do I do that?

I tried

su -- username

and then keying in the password, it did not produce any error but I saw no visible changes of the command prompt it would still say myname@myhost. The home directory also was that of myname and not the new login I tried to login as.

I'm - as it's apparent now - quite inexperienced in linux/Ubuntu, so any info is welcome.

To which user you want to change to?

The problem is that you are trying to "su" into a user that does not have a shell assigned to it. Most of the users such as mysql, pulse, etc, created by the system or by some packages when you install software does not have a shell assigned.

You can check if a user has a shell assigned by looking into the /etc/passwd file, just look at the end of the line of each user, if it says /bin/false it means that it does not have a shell assigned, if it has something like /bin/bash or any other shell, then you should be able to "su" into that user.

When i say "shell assigned" it basically means that it has "shell access"

still if the user does not have shell access, you can always execute commands as that user with

 sudo -u user command

if you have sudo access then I would recommend

sudo su username -

It does basically the same thing, but only requires you to know your password not the other users.

however if you have the other users password:

su username - should work just fine.

notice the 1 - and that it's at the end.