Develop Reference

executing unix command after sudo command using python [duplicate]

I have a script where I need to start a command, then pass some additional commands as commands to that command. I tried
su
echo I should be root now:
who am I
exit
echo done.
... but it doesn't work: The su succeeds, but then the command prompt is just staring at me. If I type exit at the prompt, the echo and who am i etc start executing! And the echo done. doesn't get executed at all.
Similarly, I need for this to work over ssh:
ssh remotehost
# this should run under my account on remotehost
su
## this should run as root on remotehost
whoami
exit
## back
exit
# back
How do I solve this?
I am looking for answers which solve this in a general fashion, and which are not specific to su or ssh in particular. The intent is for this question to become a canonical for this particular pattern.

Adding to tripleee's answer:
It is important to remember that the section of the script formatted as a here-document for another shell is executed in a different shell with its own environment (and maybe even on a different machine).
If that block of your script contains parameter expansion, command substitution, and/or arithmetic expansion, then you must use the here-document facility of the shell slightly differently, depending on where you want those expansions to be performed.
1. All expansions must be performed within the scope of the parent shell.
Then the delimiter of the here document must be unquoted.
command <<DELIMITER
...
DELIMITER
Example:
#!/bin/bash
a=0
mylogin=$(whoami)
sudo sh <<END
a=1
mylogin=$(whoami)
echo a=$a
echo mylogin=$mylogin
END
echo a=$a
echo mylogin=$mylogin
Output:
a=0
mylogin=leon
a=0
mylogin=leon
2. All expansions must be performed within the scope of the child shell.
Then the delimiter of the here document must be quoted.
command <<'DELIMITER'
...
DELIMITER
Example:
#!/bin/bash
a=0
mylogin=$(whoami)
sudo sh <<'END'
a=1
mylogin=$(whoami)
echo a=$a
echo mylogin=$mylogin
END
echo a=$a
echo mylogin=$mylogin
Output:
a=1
mylogin=root
a=0
mylogin=leon
3. Some expansions must be performed in the child shell, some - in the parent.
Then the delimiter of the here document must be unquoted and you must escape those expansion expressions that must be performed in the child shell.
Example:
#!/bin/bash
a=0
mylogin=$(whoami)
sudo sh <<END
a=1
mylogin=\$(whoami)
echo a=$a
echo mylogin=\$mylogin
END
echo a=$a
echo mylogin=$mylogin
Output:
a=0
mylogin=root
a=0
mylogin=leon

A shell script is a sequence of commands. The shell will read the script file, and execute those commands one after the other.
In the usual case, there are no surprises here; but a frequent beginner error is assuming that some commands will take over from the shell, and start executing the following commands in the script file instead of the shell which is currently running this script. But that's not how it works.
Basically, scripts work exactly like interactive commands, but how exactly they work needs to be properly understood. Interactively, the shell reads a command (from standard input), runs that command (with input from standard input), and when it's done, it reads another command (from standard input).
Now, when executing a script, standard input is still the terminal (unless you used a redirection) but the commands are read from the script file, not from standard input. (The opposite would be very cumbersome indeed - any read would consume the next line of the script, cat would slurp all the rest of the script, and there would be no way to interact with it!) The script file only contains commands for the shell instance which executes it (though you can of course still use a here document etc to embed inputs as command arguments).
In other words, these "misunderstood" commands (su, ssh, sh, sudo, bash etc) when run alone (without arguments) will start an interactive shell, and in an interactive session, that's obviously fine; but when run from a script, that's very often not what you want.
All of these commands have ways to accept commands by ways other than in an interactive terminal session. Typically, each command supports a way to pass it commands as options or arguments:
su root -c 'who am i'
ssh user#remote uname -a
sh -c 'who am i; echo success'
Many of these commands will also accept commands on standard input:
printf 'uname -a; who am i; uptime' | su
printf 'uname -a; who am i; uptime' | ssh user#remote
printf 'uname -a; who am i; uptime' | sh
which also conveniently allows you to use here documents:
ssh user#remote <<'____HERE'
uname -a
who am i
uptime
____HERE
sh <<'____HERE'
uname -a
who am i
uptime
____HERE
For commands which accept a single command argument, that command can be sh or bash with multiple commands:
sudo sh -c 'uname -a; who am i; uptime'
As an aside, you generally don't need an explicit exit because the command will terminate anyway when it has executed the script (sequence of commands) you passed in for execution.

If you want a generic solution which will work for any kind of program, you can use the expect command.
Extract from the manual page:
Expect is a program that "talks" to other interactive programs according to a script. Following the script, Expect knows what can be expected from a program and what the correct response should be. An interpreted language provides branching and high-level control structures to direct the dialogue. In addition, the user can take control and interact directly when desired, afterward returning control to the script.
Here is a working example using expect:
set timeout 60
spawn sudo su -
expect "*?assword" { send "*secretpassword*\r" }
send_user "I should be root now:"
expect "#" { send "whoami\r" }
expect "#" { send "exit\r" }
send_user "Done.\n"
exit
The script can then be launched with a simple command:
$ expect -f custom.script
You can view a full example in the following page: http://www.journaldev.com/1405/expect-script-example-for-ssh-and-su-login-and-running-commands
Note: The answer proposed by #tripleee would only work if standard input could be read once at the start of the command, or if a tty had been allocated, and won't work for any interactive program.
Example of errors if you use a pipe
echo "su whoami" |ssh remotehost
--> su: must be run from a terminal
echo "sudo whoami" |ssh remotehost
--> sudo: no tty present and no askpass program specified
In SSH, you might force a TTY allocation with multiple -t parameters, but when sudo will ask for the password, it will fail.
Without the use of a program like expect any call to a function/program which might get information from stdin will make the next command fail:
ssh use#host <<'____HERE'
echo "Enter your name:"
read name
echo "ok."
____HERE
--> The `echo "ok."` string will be passed to the "read" command

Sys exit return value not showing up when echo in bash [duplicate]

I'm studying the content of this preinst file that the script executes before that package is unpacked from its Debian archive (.deb) file.
The script has the following code:
#!/bin/bash
set -e
# Automatically added by dh_installinit
if [ "$1" = install ]; then
if [ -d /usr/share/MyApplicationName ]; then
echo "MyApplicationName is just installed"
return 1
fi
rm -Rf $HOME/.config/nautilus-actions/nautilus-actions.conf
rm -Rf $HOME/.local/share/file-manager/actions/*
fi
# End automatically added section
My first query is about the line:
set -e
I think that the rest of the script is pretty simple: It checks whether the Debian/Ubuntu package manager is executing an install operation. If it is, it checks whether my application has just been installed on the system. If it has, the script prints the message "MyApplicationName is just installed" and ends (return 1 mean that ends with an “error”, doesn’t it?).
If the user is asking the Debian/Ubuntu package system to install my package, the script also deletes two directories.
Is this right or am I missing something?

From help set :
-e Exit immediately if a command exits with a non-zero status.
But it's considered bad practice by some (bash FAQ and irc freenode #bash FAQ authors). It's recommended to use:
trap 'do_something' ERR
to run do_something function when errors occur.
See http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ/105

set -e stops the execution of a script if a command or pipeline has an error - which is the opposite of the default shell behaviour, which is to ignore errors in scripts. Type help set in a terminal to see the documentation for this built-in command.

I found this post while trying to figure out what the exit status was for a script that was aborted due to a set -e. The answer didn't appear obvious to me; hence this answer. Basically, set -e aborts the execution of a command (e.g. a shell script) and returns the exit status code of the command that failed (i.e. the inner script, not the outer script).
For example, suppose I have the shell script outer-test.sh:
#!/bin/sh
set -e
./inner-test.sh
exit 62;
The code for inner-test.sh is:
#!/bin/sh
exit 26;
When I run outer-script.sh from the command line, my outer script terminates with the exit code of the inner script:
$ ./outer-test.sh
$ echo $?
26

As per bash - The Set Builtin manual, if -e/errexit is set, the shell exits immediately if a pipeline consisting of a single simple command, a list or a compound command returns a non-zero status.
By default, the exit status of a pipeline is the exit status of the last command in the pipeline, unless the pipefail option is enabled (it's disabled by default).
If so, the pipeline's return status of the last (rightmost) command to exit with a non-zero status, or zero if all commands exit successfully.
If you'd like to execute something on exit, try defining trap, for example:
trap onexit EXIT
where onexit is your function to do something on exit, like below which is printing the simple stack trace:
onexit(){ while caller $((n++)); do :; done; }
There is similar option -E/errtrace which would trap on ERR instead, e.g.:
trap onerr ERR
Examples
Zero status example:
$ true; echo $?
0
Non-zero status example:
$ false; echo $?
1
Negating status examples:
$ ! false; echo $?
0
$ false || true; echo $?
0
Test with pipefail being disabled:
$ bash -c 'set +o pipefail -e; true | true | true; echo success'; echo $?
success
0
$ bash -c 'set +o pipefail -e; false | false | true; echo success'; echo $?
success
0
$ bash -c 'set +o pipefail -e; true | true | false; echo success'; echo $?
1
Test with pipefail being enabled:
$ bash -c 'set -o pipefail -e; true | false | true; echo success'; echo $?
1

This is an old question, but none of the answers here discuss the use of set -e aka set -o errexit in Debian package handling scripts. The use of this option is mandatory in these scripts, per Debian policy; the intent is apparently to avoid any possibility of an unhandled error condition.
What this means in practice is that you have to understand under what conditions the commands you run could return an error, and handle each of those errors explicitly.
Common gotchas are e.g. diff (returns an error when there is a difference) and grep (returns an error when there is no match). You can avoid the errors with explicit handling:
diff this that ||
echo "$0: there was a difference" >&2
grep cat food ||
echo "$0: no cat in the food" >&2
(Notice also how we take care to include the current script's name in the message, and writing diagnostic messages to standard error instead of standard output.)
If no explicit handling is really necessary or useful, explicitly do nothing:
diff this that || true
grep cat food || :
(The use of the shell's : no-op command is slightly obscure, but fairly commonly seen.)
Just to reiterate,
something || other
is shorthand for
if something; then
: nothing
else
other
fi
i.e. we explicitly say other should be run if and only if something fails. The longhand if (and other shell flow control statements like while, until) is also a valid way to handle an error (indeed, if it weren't, shell scripts with set -e could never contain flow control statements!)
And also, just to be explicit, in the absence of a handler like this, set -e would cause the entire script to immediately fail with an error if diff found a difference, or if grep didn't find a match.
On the other hand, some commands don't produce an error exit status when you'd want them to. Commonly problematic commands are find (exit status does not reflect whether files were actually found) and sed (exit status won't reveal whether the script received any input or actually performed any commands successfully). A simple guard in some scenarios is to pipe to a command which does scream if there is no output:
find things | grep .
sed -e 's/o/me/' stuff | grep ^
It should be noted that the exit status of a pipeline is the exit status of the last command in that pipeline. So the above commands actually completely mask the status of find and sed, and only tell you whether grep finally succeeded.
(Bash, of course, has set -o pipefail; but Debian package scripts cannot use Bash features. The policy firmly dictates the use of POSIX sh for these scripts, though this was not always the case.)
In many situations, this is something to separately watch out for when coding defensively. Sometimes you have to e.g. go through a temporary file so you can see whether the command which produced that output finished successfully, even when idiom and convenience would otherwise direct you to use a shell pipeline.

I believe the intention is for the script in question to fail fast.
To test this yourself, simply type set -e at a bash prompt. Now, try running ls. You'll get a directory listing. Now, type lsd. That command is not recognized and will return an error code, and so your bash prompt will close (due to set -e).
Now, to understand this in the context of a 'script', use this simple script:
#!/bin/bash
# set -e
lsd
ls
If you run it as is, you'll get the directory listing from the ls on the last line. If you uncomment the set -e and run again, you won't see the directory listing as bash stops processing once it encounters the error from lsd.

set -e The set -e option instructs bash to immediately exit if any command [1] has a non-zero exit status. You wouldn't want to set this for your command-line shell, but in a script it's massively helpful. In all widely used general-purpose programming languages, an unhandled runtime error - whether that's a thrown exception in Java, or a segmentation fault in C, or a syntax error in Python - immediately halts execution of the program; subsequent lines are not executed.
By default, bash does not do this. This default behavior is exactly what you want if you are using bash on the command line
you don't want a typo to log you out! But in a script, you really want the opposite.
If one line in a script fails, but the last line succeeds, the whole script has a successful exit code. That makes it very easy to miss the error.
Again, what you want when using bash as your command-line shell and using it in scripts are at odds here. Being intolerant of errors is a lot better in scripts, and that's what set -e gives you.
copied from : https://gist.github.com/mohanpedala/1e2ff5661761d3abd0385e8223e16425
this may help you .

Script 1: without setting -e
#!/bin/bash
decho "hi"
echo "hello"
This will throw error in decho and program continuous to next line
Script 2: With setting -e
#!/bin/bash
set -e
decho "hi"
echo "hello"
# Up to decho "hi" shell will process and program exit, it will not proceed further

It stops execution of a script if a command fails.
A notable exception is an if statement. eg:
set -e
false
echo never executed
set -e
if false; then
echo never executed
fi
echo executed
false
echo never executed

cat a.sh
#! /bin/bash
#going forward report subshell or command exit value if errors
#set -e
(cat b.txt)
echo "hi"
./a.sh; echo $?
cat: b.txt: No such file or directory
hi
0
with set -e commented out we see that echo "hi" exit status being reported and hi is printed.
cat a.sh
#! /bin/bash
#going forward report subshell or command exit value if errors
set -e
(cat b.txt)
echo "hi"
./a.sh; echo $?
cat: b.txt: No such file or directory
1
Now we see b.txt error being reported instead and no hi printed.
So default behaviour of shell script is to ignore command errors and continue processing and report exit status of last command. If you want to exit on error and report its status we can use -e option.

Starting/stopping a background Python process wtihout nohup + ps aux grep + kill

I usually use:
nohup python -u myscript.py &> ./mylog.log & # or should I use nohup 2>&1 ? I never remember
to start a background Python process that I'd like to continue running even if I log out, and:
ps aux |grep python
# check for the relevant PID
kill <relevantPID>
It works but it's a annoying to do all these steps.
I've read some methods in which you need to save the PID in some file, but that's even more hassle.
Is there a clean method to easily start / stop a Python script? like:
startpy myscript.py # will automatically continue running in
# background even if I log out
# two days later, even if I logged out / logged in again the meantime
stoppy myscript.py
Or could this long part nohup python -u myscript.py &> ./mylog.log & be written in the shebang of the script, such that I could start the script easily with ./myscript.py instead of writing the long nohup line?
Note : I'm looking for a one or two line solution, I don't want to have to write a dedicated systemd service for this operation.

As far as I know, there are just two (or maybe three or maybe four?) solutions to the problem of running background scripts on remote systems.
1) nohup
nohup python -u myscript.py > ./mylog.log 2>&1 &
1 bis) disown
Same as above, slightly different because it actually remove the program to the shell job lists, preventing the SIGHUP to be sent.
2) screen (or tmux as suggested by neared)
Here you will find a starting point for screen.
See this post for a great explanation of how background processes works. Another related post.
3) Bash
Another solution is to write two bash functions that do the job:
mynohup () {
[[ "$1" = "" ]] && echo "usage: mynohup python_script" && return 0
nohup python -u "$1" > "${1%.*}.log" 2>&1 < /dev/null &
}
mykill() {
ps -ef | grep "$1" | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}' | xargs kill
echo "process "$1" killed"
}
Just put the above functions in your ~/.bashrc or ~/.bash_profile and use them as normal bash commands.
Now you can do exactly what you told:
mynohup myscript.py # will automatically continue running in
# background even if I log out
# two days later, even if I logged out / logged in again the meantime
mykill myscript.py
4) Daemon
This daemon module is very useful:
python myscript.py start
python myscript.py stop

Do you mean log in and out remotely (e.g. via SSH)? If so, a simple solution is to install tmux (terminal multiplexer). It creates a server for terminals that run underneath it as clients. You open up tmux with tmux, type in your command, type in CONTROL+B+D to 'detach' from tmux, and then type exit at the main terminal to log out. When you log back in, tmux and the processes running in it will still be running.

Bash - redirect stdout and stderr to files with background process

I've created a simple init script for an application I'm building. The start part of the script looks like this:
user="ec2-user"
name=`basename $0`
pid_file="/var/run/python_worker.pid"
stdout_log="/var/log/worker/worker.log"
stderr_log="/var/log/worker/worker.err"
get_pid() {
cat "$pid_file"
}
is_running() {
[ -f "$pid_file" ] && ps `get_pid` > /dev/null 2>&1
}
case "$1" in
start)
if is_running; then
echo "Already started"
else
echo "Starting $name"
cd /var/lib/worker
. venv/bin/activate
. /etc/profile.d/worker.sh
python run.py >> "$stdout_log" 2>> "$stderr_log" &
echo $! > "$pid_file"
if ! is_running; then
echo "Unable to start, see $stdout_log and $stderr_log"
exit 1
fi
echo "$name running"
fi
I'm having trouble with this line:
python run.py >> "$stdout_log" 2>> "$stderr_log" &
I want to start my application with this code and redirect the outputs to the files specified above. However, when I include the & to make it run in the background, nothing appears in the two log files. BUT, when I remove the & from this line, the log files get data. Why is this happening?
Obviously I need to run the command to make it run as a background process in order to stop the shell waiting.
I am also sure that the process is running when I use the &. I can find it with a ps -aux :
root 11357 7.0 3.1 474832 31828 pts/1 Sl 21:22 0:00 python run.py
Anyone know what I'm doing wrong? :)

Anyone know what I'm doing wrong? :)
Short Answer:
Yes. add -u to the python command and it should work.
python -u run.py >> "$stdout_log" 2>> "$stderr_log" &
Long Answer:
It's a buffering issue (from man python):
-u Force stdin, stdout and stderr to be totally unbuffered. On systems where it matters, also put stdin, stdout
and stderr in binary mode. Note that there is internal buffering in xreadlines(), readlines() and file-
object iterators ("for line in sys.stdin") which is not influenced by this option. To work around this, you
will want to use "sys.stdin.readline()" inside a "while 1:" loop.

Returning from bash script that invokes a python script

I have a bash script (Controller.sh) that invokes a python script (MyDaemon.py). The latter takes an argument and a command, and can be invoked from the command line like so:
/usr/bin/python /opt/stuff/MyDaemon.py -p Blue start
or
/usr/bin/python /opt/stuff/MyDaemon.py -p Blue stop
or
/usr/bin/python /opt/stuff/MyDaemon.py -p Blue status
I am attempting to get Controller.sh to invoke MyDaemon.py and then exit with a status. The python script should be kicked off and Controller.sh should return. This is my Controller.sh code:
COLOR=$1
COMMAND=$2
DIRNAME=`dirname $0`
RESULT="/tmp/$COLOR.$COMMAND.result"
# remove any old console output
rm -f $RESULT 2>/dev/null
#start with CPU affinity for anything other than CPU 0.
sudo taskset -c 1-8 /usr/bin/python /opt/stuff/MyDaemon.py -p $COLOR $COMMMAND</dev/null >$RESULT 2>&1
STATUS=$?
# print output
cat $RESULT
# check on success
if [ $STATUS -ne 0 ]
then
echo "ERROR: $COLOR $COMMAND failed"
exit 1
fi
Now, if on the command line I invoke Controller.sh blue start it kicks off the python script, but Controller.sh does not return a status. On the other hand, if I run the following it does return:
[nford#myserver]# sudo taskset -c 1-8 /usr/bin/python /opt/stuff/MyDaemon.py -p blue start</dev/null >/tmp/blah.log 2>&1
Started with pid 1326
[nford#myserver]#
I am forced to conclude that there is something about the bash script that is preventing it from returning.
It should be noted that MyDaemon.py does fork processes, which is why I need to redirect output. It should also be noted that I'm lifting the majority of this from another script that does something similar with a php script; some of the meaning I'm fuzzy on (such as STATUS=$?). That said, even if I cut out everything after the sudo taskset invocation line, it still fails to return cleanly. How do I get the bash script to properly execute this command?
Post-Script: I'm a little baffled how this question is 'too specific' and was down-voted/voted to close. In an attempt to be crystal clear; I'm trying to understand the differences in how a forking process script runs in the context of the command line versus a bash script. I've provided a specific example above, but this is a general concept.
UPDATE:
This results when I run the script using bash -x, further showing that it dies on the sudo taskset line. The fact it's left off the start command is confusing.
[nford#myserver]# bash -x Controller.sh Blue start
+ COLOR=Blue
+ COMMAND=start
++ dirname Controller.sh
+ DIRNAME=.
+ RESULT=/tmp/Blue.start.result
+ rm -f /tmp/Blue.start.result
+ sudo taskset -c 1-8 /usr/bin/python /opt/stuff/MyDaemon.py -p Blue
UPDATE:
bash -x reveals the problem: the start command is not being passed through: a typo in the variable name produces as silent bash error. Takeaway: use bash -x for debugging!

Because of your typo - You should use set -u at the top of your scripts, it's a life saver and stops sleepless nights as well as negating the pulling of hair.
set -u would have given you...
myscript.sh: line 11: COMMMAND: unbound variable
Remember you can run scripts like so bash -u myscript.sh arg1 arg2 likewise with -x, they both help it tracking down script issues.