On Saturday, 19-10-2024 at 14:20 Greg Wooledge wrote: > On Sat, Oct 19, 2024 at 13:58:56 +1100, George at Clug wrote: > > When logged in as root, the following worked for me using a local user account (e.g. not the root user): > > > > # runuser --user notroot -- bash -lic 'aplay /usr/share/sounds/purple/alert.wav' > > Huh, interesting. That --user option is NOT in the man page. I'm > guessing it's a synonym for -u. (I verified that it actually does > work on Debian 12. It's just not documented.) > > The bash -lic '...' wrapper seems like overkill to me, though. You > don't need a login shell (-l) or an interactive shell (-i) to run > that aplay command. > > I also wonder whether runuser is actually needed there, or whether > setpriv would be sufficient. It might depend on whether "notroot" is > already logged in to establish a "seat" or whatever it's called with > access to the audio devices. (That's another thing I'd want to test, > if this were my project -- does "notroot" need to be logged in for > this to work?) >
I was curious too: # runuser --user notloggedinnotrootuser -- bash -lic 'aplay /usr/share/sounds/sound-icons/prompt.wav' aplay: main:831: audio open error: Host is down I guess you have to be logged in as yourself, using your own user account, then open a terminal and su in as root. My account is not in sudoers so I have not tested this using "sudo -i", or "sudo su". And I found that this worked even without the -l and -i # runuser --user loggedinnotrootuser -- bash -c 'aplay /usr/share/sounds/sound-icons/prompt.wav' I was not able get "# sudo -u" to work in place of using runuser. So much more testing one could do. >
