setting gsettings of other user with sudo

Question

On Ubuntu 13.10, I have all of my gsettings in a file, mygset.sh. For example, mygset.sh contains many lines such as

gsettings set com.canonical.Unity.Launcher favorites "['application://nautilus.desktop', 'application://firefox.desktop', 'application://chromium-browser.desktop', 'unity://running-apps', 'unity://expo-icon', 'unity://devices']"

I have a master install script that I have to run with sudo (e.g. it does sudo apt-get install). From that master install script I want to call mygset.sh. However, no matter how I call it it is not changing the settings for my user. I think it is changing the settings of root. I've tried it like (from masterinstall.sh which is being run as sudo ./masterinstall.sh):

sudo -u "wang" ./mygset.sh
sudo -u "wang" bash -c ./mygset.sh

Neither of those works (they run without error and change the setting [I check within the script with gsetting get] but not for user "wang").

When I run mygset.sh from the command line (without sudo: bash ./mygset.sh). It works perfectly. Why is there this difference and what can I do to solve it within masterinstall.sh?

Answer 1

By default sudo sets the uid and the gid to the user you've specified but it doesn't change the environment settings etc.

Suggest you try -H first, which sets the $HOME variable to the target user:

sudo -u "wang" -H ./myget.sh

If that doesn't work, try -i which is supposed to simulate the initial login.

A slightly different tack, which I've found sometimes works, is to use su:

sudo su - wang
/full/path/to/myget.sh
exit

You'll need to use the full path to the script because the su command changes the current working directory.