Question

Is it possible to ask for a root pw without storing in in my script memory and to run some of os.* commands as root?

My script

1. scans some folders and files to check if it can do the job
2. makes some changes in /etc/…
3. creates a folder and files that should be owned by the user who ran the script

(1) can be done as a normal user. I can do (2) by sudoing the script, but then the folder and files in (3) will be root’s.

The issue is that I use a lot of os.makedirs, os.symlink, etc, which stops me from making it runnable by a normal user.

Tanks 2 all for suggestions

The solution so far is:

# do all in sudo
os.chown(folder, int(os.getenv('SUDO_UID')), int(os.getenv('SUDO_GID')))

thanks to gnibbler for hint.

Answer 1

gnibbler gave a hint at os.chown. The problem was then to know the ID of the user behind sudo. That information is stored in environment variables SUDO_*:

os.chown, (some_path, int(os.getenv('SUDO_UID')), int(os.getenv('SUDO_GID')))

Splitting the code in 3 files could be a solution, but the code is already mixed, so that’s not suitable.