How can I pass Root Password to a script

Question

I have the root password in one of my scripts and I want to launch another script which requires root permission from this script. How can I use the root password which I have so that I do not have to ask the user the root password which launching 2nd script.

Answer 1

There's a lot of security implications in this, but let's get right to the best way to handle this.

Don't use the root password directly. Use sudo to run the scripts. Sudo is installed by default on Ubuntu and is available on almost all popular Linux distributions in the package repositories. Once sudo is installed, you'll want to edit /etc/sudoers.

su -
visudo
# add something like the following:
Cmnd_Alias SCRIPT=/path/to/script1
script_user ALL=NOPASSWD: SCRIPT

Thus script_user can run the first script as root through sudo, which would then launch the other script as root. For more information about the sudoers file, see the sudoers(5) man page on your system.

But do your scripts absolutely have to run as root? Most times this isn't required at all, but is done out of convenience.