How to write a shell script that runs some commands as superuser and some commands not as superuser, without having to babysit it?

File sutest

#!/bin/bash
echo "uid is ${UID}"
echo "user is ${USER}"
echo "username is ${USERNAME}"

run it: `./sutest’ gives me

uid is 500
user is stephenp
username is stephenp

but using sudo: sudo ./sutest gives

uid is 0
user is root
username is stephenp

So you retain the original user name in $USERNAME when running as sudo. This leads to a solution similar to what others posted:

#!/bin/bash
sudo -u ${USERNAME} normal_command_1
root_command_1
root_command_2
sudo -u ${USERNAME} normal_command_2
# etc.

Just sudo to invoke your script in the first place, it will prompt for the password once.

I originally wrote this answer on Linux, which does have some differences with OS X

OS X (I’m testing this on Mountain Lion 10.8.3) has an environment variable SUDO_USER when you’re running sudo, which can be used in place of USERNAME above, or to be more cross-platform the script could check to see if SUDO_USER is set and use it if so, or use USERNAME if that’s set.

Changing the original script for OS X, it becomes…

#!/bin/bash
sudo -u ${SUDO_USER} normal_command_1
root_command_1
root_command_2
sudo -u ${SUDO_USER} normal_command_2
# etc.

A first stab at making it cross-platform could be…

#!/bin/bash
#
# set "THE_USER" to SUDO_USER if that's set,
#  else set it to USERNAME if THAT is set,
#   else set it to the string "unknown"
# should probably then test to see if it's "unknown"
#
THE_USER=${SUDO_USER:-${USERNAME:-unknown}}

sudo -u ${THE_USER} normal_command_1
root_command_1
root_command_2
sudo -u ${THE_USER} normal_command_2
# etc.