How do I use su to execute the rest of the bash script as that user?

Question

Much simpler: use sudo to run a shell and use a heredoc to feed it commands.

#!/usr/bin/env bash
whoami
sudo -i -u someuser bash << EOF
echo "In"
whoami
EOF
echo "Out"
whoami

(answer originally on SuperUser)

The trick is to use "sudo" command instead of "su"

You may need to add this

username1 ALL=(username2) NOPASSWD: /path/to/svn

to your /etc/sudoers file

and change your script to:

sudo -u username2 -H sh -c "cd /home/$USERNAME/$PROJECT; svn update" 

Where username2 is the user you want to run the SVN command as and username1 is the user running the script.

If you need multiple users to run this script, use a %groupname instead of the username1

You need to execute all the different-user commands as their own script. If it's just one, or a few commands, then inline should work. If it's lots of commands then it's probably best to move them to their own file.

su -c "cd /home/$USERNAME/$PROJECT ; svn update" -m "$USERNAME" 

Use a script like the following to execute the rest or part of the script under another user:

#!/bin/sh

id

exec sudo -u transmission /bin/sh - << eof

id

eof

Here is yet another approach, which was more convenient in my case (I just wanted to drop root privileges and do the rest of my script from restricted user): you can make the script restart itself from correct user. Let's suppose it is run as root initially. Then it will look like this:

#!/bin/bash
if [ $UID -eq 0 ]; then
  user=$1
  dir=$2
  shift 2     # if you need some other parameters
  cd "$dir"
  exec su "$user" "$0" -- "$@"
  # nothing will be executed beyond that line,
  # because exec replaces running process with the new one
fi

echo "This will be run from user $UID"
...

Use sudo instead

EDIT: As Douglas pointed out, you can not use cd in sudo since it is not an external command. You have to run the commands in a subshell to make the cd work.

sudo -u $USERNAME -H sh -c "cd ~/$PROJECT; svn update"

sudo -u $USERNAME -H cd ~/$PROJECT
sudo -u $USERNAME svn update

You may be asked to input that user's password, but only once.