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esc1729
Asked: 2009-08-05 06:04:36 +0800 CST

Getting a shell on a shell-less account?

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I’m managing a CentOS 4.7 server with several for security reasons shell-less user accounts. But sometimes I need a user-shell for installations anyway. What is the best way to get a login shell? Just now I use

sudo –u <user> bash –rcfile /home/<user>/.bash_profile

But this is not perfect. A lot of the environment variables are not intitialized.

Erich

centos bash sudo

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Try:

    sudo -u <user> -H -- bash -l

    The sudo argument "-H" will set the home directory properly, and the "-l" option to bash will indicate that this is a login shell. You might also experiment with adding the bash argument "-p".

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