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So as the question suggests, I'm trying to store the user. If I wanted to do that. Could I do

username = $USER

at the start of the script or is there some other way I could go about it? The reason I'm doing this is because I become root later on, and I want to set the previous users shell. I'm on Fedora Linux, using bash, later however it switches to zsh

Heres what I run currently:

#User types sudo password.
sudo -i 
#Shell setup
#Install ZSH
sudo dnf install zsh -y
#Install oh-my-zsh
sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.github.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/master/tools/install.sh)"
#Install starship
sudo dnf install starship
#Export variables & aliases
echo ~/.zshrc > "alias "vim"="nvim""
echo ~/.zshrc > "alias ".."="cd ..""
echo ~/.zshrc > "alias "lsblk"="lsblk -e 7""
#Add it as the default prompt
echo ~/.zshrc > "eval "$(starship init zsh)"
# Change users shell to zsh
chsh -s /bin/zsh $USERNAME```
#Username would be the non-root user that originally ran the script. Username is not defined because I don't know how to get the original user that ran the script before becoming root.
Kusalananda
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itscryptic
  • 3

1 Answers1

3

Yes, you can save a variable in a new variable almost as you show, but without the spaces in both bash and zsh:

username=$USER

I don't know what you are trying to do since there is no information in the question, but note that sudo sets the SUDO_USER variable to the value of $USER when it was launched:

$ sudo sh -c 'echo "user:$USER sudo_user:$SUDO_USER"'
user:root sudo_user:terdon

Now that you have shared the script, you also need to fix some other things. echo ~/.zshrc > "alias "vim"="nvim"" will echo the string ~/.zshrc into file named alias vim=nvim. Presumably, you want to echo alias vim="nvim" into ~/.zshrc instead. This is a really, really bad idea of course, since it will keep on adding this line every time you run, so you might want to first check for the presence of the line before echoing it.

Next, you can indeed use SUDO_USER to get the original user name. However, this is all kind of pointless since after the sudo -i, no other command will be executed until you exit the sudo -i shell. If you just want to authenticate, you only need to do that once unless your sudo isn't set up to remember the password for even a few seconds (but then, sudo -i won't work any better). See https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/579447/22222 for details on how to change the sudo timeout so you don't need to enter the password multiple times.

Finally, you don't actually need to store the user: you are only running a few, specific commands with sudo (good!) so the chsh would be running as the original user anyway. What's more, the ohmyzsh install script already offers to make zsh your default shell so you don't need the chsh command at all.

Putting all that together:

#!/bin/bash

#Install ZSH
sudo dnf install zsh -y


#Install oh-my-zsh
sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.github.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/master/tools/install.sh)"


#Install starship
sudo dnf install starship


#Export variables & aliases
lines=("alias vim='nvim'" "alias ..='cd ..'" 

                          "alias lsblk='lsblk -e 7" 

                          "eval "$(starship init zsh)"" )
for line in "${lines[@]}"; do
  grep -q "$line" ~/.zshrc || printf '%s\n' "$line" >> ~/.zshrc
done


Change user's shell to zsh. This isn't needed, you can simply answer


yes when prompted by the ohmyzsh installation script.


chsh -s /bin/zsh $USER
terdon
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