Changing to root user inside shell script

Question

I have a shell script which needs non-root user account to run certain commands and then change the user to root to run the rest of the script. I am using SUSE11. I have use

Answer 1

There is an easy way to do it without a second script. Just put this at the start of your file:

if [ "$(whoami)" != "root" ]
then
    sudo su -s "$0"
    exit
fi

Then it will automatically run itself as root. Of course, this assumes that you can sudo su without having to provide a password - but that's out of scope of this answer; see one of the other questions about using sudo in shell scripts for how to do that.