run bash script with elevated privileges from subprocess python multithreaded call

Question

I'm programming in python on linux, and I am using multiprocessing_pool.apply_async to call a bash script using subprocess.check_output

The bash script is calling alien and rpmbuild. The alien command needs to run as root, and because of this the rpmbuild command does also, following a root sed command to correct some rpm idiosyncrasies.

At the moment, if I want to convert several debs to rpms, I have to enter my admin password, several times.

Is there a way that I can enter my admin password only once? ie that the script is always called with its different variables as new processes, but always elevated privileges following one password entry? At the moment I am using pkexec to call the script with sudo being used in the script itself.

Many thanks

Benoît P · Accepted Answer · 2019-02-20 12:01:00Z

1

If you run the python script as super-user, the script should not ask you a password:

$ sudo python -c "import os ; os.system('whoami')"
root

So run your thing as usual but with sudo before python. If you need to run multiple python scripts and type your password only once, type sudo su. You will then be root for all commands (without prepending sudo) until you close the terminal session.

Alternative ways to give the password:

You can use sudo -A if you want a gui prompt to appear for the password.
You can use sudo -S if you want to pass the password as stdin.

Each process has its own user, you will have to create multiple processes to have multiple users.

edited Feb 20, 2019 at 12:01

answered Feb 19, 2019 at 20:11

Benoît P

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3 Comments

chepner Over a year ago

Better: use sudo only from check_output to run the bash script, not the entire Python script.

miller the gorilla Over a year ago

thanks, but I am hoping to keep the python qt program as a standard user, and only run sudo once. I guess I could separate out the methods from the python class, put them in their own class and then call that as super user perhaps?

miller the gorilla Over a year ago

I ended up calling pkexec from subprocess

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