evan> sudo su -
[root ]# echo $USER
root
[root ]# echo $SUDO_USER
[root ]# echo $LOGNAME
root
[root ]# whoami
root
[root ]# who am i | awk '{print $1}'
evan
[root ]# logname
evan
[root ]#
sudo su -; su tom :
evan> sudo su -
[root ]# su tom
tom$ echo $USER
tom
tom$ echo $SUDO_USER
tom$ echo $LOGNAME
tom
tom$ whoami
tom
tom$ who am i | awk '{print $1}'
evan
tom$ logname
evan
tom$
There's no perfect answer. When you change user IDs, the original user ID is not usually preserved, so the information is lost. Some programs, such as logname and who -m implement a hack where they check to see which terminal is connected to stdin, and then check to see what user is logged in on that terminal.
This solution often works, but isn't foolproof, and certainly shouldn't be considered secure. For example, imagine if who outputs the following:
tom pts/0 2011-07-03 19:18 (1.2.3.4)
joe pts/1 2011-07-03 19:10 (5.6.7.8)
tom used su to get to root, and runs your program. If STDIN is not redirected, then a program like logname will output tom. If it IS redirected (e.g. from a file) as so:
logname < /some/file
Then the result is "no login name", since the input isn't the terminal. More interestingly still, though, is the fact that the user could pose as a different logged in user. Since Joe is logged in on pts/1, Tom could pretend to be him by running
logname < /dev/pts1
Now, it says joe even though tom is the one who ran the command. In other words, if you use this mechanism in any sort of security role, you're crazy.
This is a ksh function I wrote on HP-UX. I don't know how it will work with Bash in Linux. The idea is that the sudo process is running as the original user and the child processes are the target user. By cycling back through parent processes, we can find the user of the original process.
#
# The options of ps require UNIX_STD=2003. I am setting it
# in a subshell to avoid having it pollute the parent's namespace.
#
function findUser
{
thisPID=$$
origUser=$(whoami)
thisUser=$origUser
while [ "$thisUser" = "$origUser" ]
do
( export UNIX_STD=2003; ps -p$thisPID -ouser,ppid,pid,comm ) | grep $thisPID | read thisUser myPPid myPid myComm
thisPID=$myPPid
done
if [ "$thisUser" = "root" ]
then
thisUser=$origUser
fi
if [ "$#" -gt "0" ]
then
echo $origUser--$thisUser--$myComm
else
echo $thisUser
fi
return 0
}
I know the original question was from a long time ago but people (such as me) are still asking and this looked like a good place to put the solution.
By exlcuding non-TTY processes, I skip root as the initiator of the login. I'm not sure if that may exlcude too much in some case
#!/bin/ksh
function findUserList
{
typeset userList prevUser thisPID thisUser myPPid myPid myTTY myComm
thisPID=$$ # starting with this process-ID
while [ "$thisPID" != 1 ] # and cycling back to the origin
do
( ps -p$thisPID -ouser,ppid,pid,tty,comm ) | grep $thisPID | read thisUser myPPid myPid myTTY myComm
thisPID=$myPPid
[[ $myComm =~ ^su ]] && continue # su is always run by root -> skip it
[[ $myTTY == '?' ]] && continue # skip what is running somewhere in the background (without a terminal)
if [[ $prevUser != $thisUser ]]; then # we only want the change of user
prevUser="$thisUser" # keep the user for comparing
userList="${userList:+$userList }$thisUser" # and add the new user to the list
fi
#print "$thisPID=$thisUser: $userList -> $thisUser -> $myComm " >&2
done
print "$userList"
return 0
}
logname or who am i didn't give me the desired answer, especially not in longer lists of su user1, su user2, su user3, ...
I know the original question was from a long time ago but people (such as me) are still asking and this looked like a good place to put the solution.
If we could arrange the process spawn hierarchy into a tree, then we could look for the user who spawned the process at the root of that tree. Luckily the pstree command does that arrangement for us.
pstree -lu -s $$ | grep --max-count=1 -o '([^)]*)' | head -n 1 | sed 's/[()]//g'
pstree shows running processes as a tree. The tree is rooted at a pid, here given as $$, which in bash expands to the process id of the current shell. So the first part of the command lists all the ancestor processes of the current shell with some funny formatting. The rest of the command discards the funny formatting to pick out the name of the user that owns the oldest ancestor process.
The main improvement over the other pstree-based answer here is that extraneous parentheses are not included in the output.
The session-status and show-ssession system commands of loginctl have different behavior without arguments: session-status uses the current session, but show-ssession uses the manager. However, using show-session is preferable for script use due to its machine-readable output. This is why two invocations of loginctl are needed.