Running Specific Commands As Another User

**rhololkeolke** · May 27th, 2009

I was trying to set it up so that I could have certain commands run as root without a password by certain users. I read that I should edit the sudoers file but what I'm doing doesn't seem to be working. I tried editing it with visudo to add

Code:

rhol ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:/usr/bin/update

However, when I run the command

Code:

sudo -u root -H /usr/bin/update

it lets me run every command and program as root without prompting for a password. I just want that one command to run. Can someone please explain what I'm doing wrong. Thanks in advance.

**prinny42** · May 28th, 2009

I don't know much about /etc/sudoers myself, so I can't really explain how it works, but adding this to the end of it should enable you to run a specific command (and only that command) without a password:

Code:

yourusername ALL=NOPASSWD: /path/to/command

**rhololkeolke** · June 1st, 2009

I added your syntax to my sudoers file and it still didn't work. However, I decided I would check the owner of the script I had set as executable using

Code:

chmod u+x /path/to/script

It turns out that somehow either when I created the file or when I ran the command the owner had changed to root and so it wouldn't let me run it without a password. I quick

Code: