Run command as not-root

Hi everyone

At work, I have to run a command in an AWS instance. In that particular instance only exists the root user. The command should not be executed with root privileges (it executes mpirun, which is not recommended to run as sudo or the machine might break), so I was wondering if there is a way to block or disable the sudo privileges while the command is running. As mentioned, the only user existing there is root, so I suppose “sudo -u” is not an option.

Does anyone know how to do it? Thanks in advance!

@linux

  • planish@sh.itjust.works
    1·
    1 year ago

    You probably want to run the command as nobody, the special system user who daemons become when they don’t want to have root permissions.

    • Nicolas Rojas@social.vivaldi.netOP
      0·
      1 year ago

      @ursakhiin honestly, didn’t consider it. Just checked and the “docker” command doesn’t even exist so I assume that is not the case. Do you know if the is any other way I can be certain?

      • ursakhiin@beehaw.org
        1·
        1 year ago

        Well, the docker command wouldn’t exist inside of a container. You could use uname to check the system info.

        How is it you don’t know this information about a system you’ve connected to?

        • Nicolas Rojas@social.vivaldi.netOP
          0·
          1 year ago

          @ursakhiin honestly, I didn’t even know an aws instance could be a docker image. Everything I did was creating the instance normally so I assumed it was just a regular vm. But already double checked and it is not a docker image, so no problem there 🙂

          • ursakhiin@beehaw.org
            1·
            1 year ago

            It’s not that an Amazon instance can be a docker container. It was more that the behavior you are describing is extremely odd for a full Linux environment but normal for a docker container.

            If you created the instance, it isn’t likely a container. But it also sounds like the base image might be poorly set up