changing user in upstart script

Question

I have an upstart script that does some logging tasks. The script testjob.conf looks like below:

description "Start Logging"
start on runlevel [2345]

script
  sudo -u user_name echo Test Job ran at  `date` >> /home/user_name/Desktop/jobs.log
end script

Then I run the script with sudo service testjob start and I get testjob stop/waiting as result. The file jobs.log is created and the logging is done. However the file is owned by root. I wanted to change this and hence added sudo -u user_name part infront of the command mentioned in this similar post .

However this doesnot seem to do the trick. Is there another way to do this ?

Answer 1

The log file is created by the >> indirection which runs in the context of the root shell that also starts sudo .

Try making the process that sudo starts create the file, for instance with:

sudo -u user_name sh -c 'echo Test Job ran at  `date` >> /home/user_name/Desktop/jobs.log'

In this case the sh running as user_name will "execute" the >> indirection.