How do I force the user to become root

Question

I have written a bash script for use on my ubuntu box. Now I would like to prevent running this script under my own user and only able to run it as root (sudo).

Is there a possibility to force this. Can I somehow let my script ask for root permissions if I run it under my own username?

Answer 1

sudo chown root yourcode
sudo chmod 500 yourcode

Voila!

Answer 2

You can change the permissions, so that only root can execute it. Or you could use whoami command and in case that it isn't root force sudo.

Answer 3

I have a standard function I use in bash for this very purpose:

# Check if we're root and re-execute if we're not.
rootcheck () {
    if [ $(id -u) != "0" ]
    then
        sudo "$0" "$@"  # Modified as suggested below.
        exit $?
    fi
}

There's probably more elegant ways (I wrote this AGES ago!), but this works fine for me.