In Linux, there are a number of situations where running a certain command as another user is necessary. It’s especially true in the professional/enterprise environment where there are a number of users. This method is also useful if one user doesn’t have any particular shells.

Running command

For performing the action, you have to follow the following structure –

su -s <shell_path> <user_name> -c <command>

For example, I have Apache installed and there’s a PHP file at the location “/var/www/html”. In order to run the file as user “viktor”, the following command will be necessary –

su -s /bin/sh viktor -c "/usr/bin/php /var/www/html/php_demo.php"

Enjoy!