Question

I’m creating a Bash installer script which compiles and installs some libraries for both OSX and Linux. Because some commands in my script (“make install”, “apt-get install”, “port install”, etc) require sudo, I need the user to supply the password.

Currently the user gets asked for the password whenever the first sudo command is about to execute, but because this is often after a compile stage, there is always some time between starting the script and having to enter the password.

I would like to put the password entry + check at the beginning of the script. Also I am curious if this is really an ok way of installing system libraries.

Alternatively I could install the libraries in a local sandbox location which doesn’t require sudo, but then I’ll have to tell apt-get and macports where to install their libraries other then the default /usr/local/ and /opt/local, and I’m not sure how to do that nor if that’s a clever idea at all.

Answer 1

To get the password, just put sudo echo "Thanks." at the start of the script.

But I would prefer this solution:

if [[ $UID != 0 ]]; then
    echo "Please run this script with sudo:"
    echo "sudo $0 $*"
    exit 1
fi