There's a lot of security implications in this, but let's get right to the best way to handle this.
Don't use the root password directly. Use sudo to run the scripts. Sudo is installed by default on Ubuntu and is available on almost all popular Linux distributions in the package repositories. Once sudo is installed, you'll want to edit /etc/sudoers.
su -
visudo
# add something like the following:
Cmnd_Alias SCRIPT=/path/to/script1
script_user ALL=NOPASSWD: SCRIPT
Thus script_user
can run the first script as root through sudo, which would then launch the other script as root. For more information about the sudoers file, see the sudoers(5)
man page on your system.
But do your scripts absolutely have to run as root? Most times this isn't required at all, but is done out of convenience.
if this is a programming question shouldn't this be on stackoverflow? – rzlines – 2009-08-20T08:00:08.350
@rzlines,: Administrative bash scripts are not really 'programming', it may be a better fit for ServerFault, or UnixSE... but really it should be just fine where it is. – J. M. Becker – 2012-05-23T20:04:22.073