Change user AND environment in bash script

Question

Why does this work (as root):

$su - aba
~> echo $JAVA_HOME

Ausgabe: /usr/java/jdk1.7.0_45

And not this shell script (also run as root):

#!/bin/bash
su - aba << EOF
echo $JAVA_HOME > tmp
EOF

Output:

$more tmp

$

Question: How can I make this work? Or better: My goal is to execute some commands as another user and also use this enviroment of this user and maybe even change his enviroment (only temporary).

EDIT In the meantime I succeeded with runuser - aba -c 'echo JAVA_HOME', altough it's not in all aspects what wished for, because I still can only transfer one command-line.

Answer 1

su - aba

is short for

su --login ada

which doesn't make sense inside a script. Since you don't have a terminal once it is run it goes back to the previous user (root).

try

su -c "echo $JAVA_HOME" ada

but even this won't run the users .profile or .bashrc.

However you are root and you should be able to parse those files for the proper settings.

eg.

TEMP_JAVA=$(grep JAVA_HOME /home/$USER/.bashrc)
JAVA_HOME=${TEMP_JAVA##*=} echo $JAVA_HOME