how to switch to root user without entering password in bash script on RedHat

Question

I want to switch to root user in bash script on RedHat by specifying the password in code rather than entering it.

Any help will be highly appreciated.

Thanks

Answer 1

It's not a good idea to store passwords in plain text in a script. You can use visudo to edit the sudoers file and allow users to run a command using sudo without using a password.

Answer 2

The flexibility of sudo is widely under-estimated. This leads to very poor practices (like the sudo su - canon-ball surgery method).

A much better method is to specificly allow the commands you intend to allow without use of a password:

phill = NOPASSWD: /bin/ls, /usr/bin/lprm

---

See for more examples: Shell script - Sudo-permissions lost over time

Answer 3

Let sudo read from stdin using the -S flag

sudo -S mkdir /mnt/somedir <<END 
password here

END   

This will let a user create a directory in /mnt owned by root

EDIT: this doesn't seem to work for the "su" command, yet I think this solution might be helpful