Get users home directory when they run a script as

Question

I have a sh script that needs to be run as root, however it is run by the end user using sudo. How can I get the users home directory when ~/ points to /root when running with sudo?

Answer 1

$ sudo env |grep USER
USER=root
USERNAME=root
SUDO_USER=glglgl

So you can access $SUDO_USER and ask the system for his homedir with getent passwd $SUDO_USER | cut -d: -f6.

Answer 2

Try to avoid eval. Especially with root perms.

You can do:

USER_HOME=$(getent passwd $SUDO_USER | cut -d: -f6)

Update:

here is why to avoid eval.

Answer 3

Try accessing the environment variable $SUDO_USER

Answer 4

Unless I misunderstood the question, when the user runs the script with sudo, the $HOME environment variable does not change. To test out, I created this script:

#!/bin/bash
#sudo_user.sh
env | grep -e USER -e HOME

... and run it:

sudo ./sudo_user.sh

Output:

USER=root
HOME=/home/haiv
USERNAME=root
SUDO_USER=haiv

The output tells me that $HOME is still pointing to the user's home (in this case, /home/haiv).

Answer 5

The user's home directory would be ~$SUDO_USER. You can use eval as follows:

USER_HOME=$(eval echo ~${SUDO_USER})
echo ${USER_HOME}