Change to sudo user within a python script

Question

I have a problem. I am writing a piece of software, which is required to perform an operation which requires the user to be in sudo mode. running \'sudo python filename.py\'

Answer 1

I've recently dealt with this problem while making a system installation script. To switch to superuser permissions, I used subprocess.call() with 'sudo':

#!/usr/bin/python

import subprocess
import shlex
import getpass

print "This script was called by: " + getpass.getuser()

print "Now do something as 'root'..."
subprocess.call(shlex.split('sudo id -nu'))

print "Now switch back to the calling user: " + getpass.getuser()

Note that you need to use shlex.split() to make your command usable for subprocess.call(). If you want to use the output from a command, you can use subprocess.check_output(). There is also a package called 'sh' (http://amoffat.github.com/sh/) that you can use for this purpose.