Question

I would like to run eclipse using my user, and tomcat inside eclipse using the user “tomcat”
Is that possible? Any ideas?
It is not a problem that is a security issue, as I am in my home behing a firewall, with no services opened to the world

Answer 1

I don’t know how Eclipse runs Tomcat, but it will need for sure to run an executable. So, you can chown that executable to the user tomcat and then setuid the executable. For example:

chown tomcat:tomcat /path/to/bin/tomcat
chmod +s /path/to/bin/tomcat

With the setuid bit any executable is ran as the user who owns it.

I didn’t test it, but it should work fine.