Get users home directory when they run a script as root

Question

I have a sh script that needs to be run as root, however it is run by the end user using sudo. How can I get the users home directory when ~/ points to /root when running with s

Answer 1

Unless I misunderstood the question, when the user runs the script with sudo, the $HOME environment variable does not change. To test out, I created this script:

#!/bin/bash
#sudo_user.sh
env | grep -e USER -e HOME

... and run it:

sudo ./sudo_user.sh

Output:

USER=root
HOME=/home/haiv
USERNAME=root
SUDO_USER=haiv

The output tells me that $HOME is still pointing to the user's home (in this case, /home/haiv).