strange problem with sudo -u

[esolve]

I downloaded a firefox linux package
uncompress it and put it under my home dir
when I 'cd' into firefox and run the following command with my user account "esolve"

./firefox

it works fine
but when I switch to root account, and run

sudo -u esolve ./firefox

I see the errors below, and firefox can't be opened, THEN I tried to modify the package owner: chown -R esolve:esolve firefox, the error persists and firefox still can't be opened

Error: Access was denied while trying to open files in your profile directory

if I just run it as root account, there will be errors but firefox can still be opened

I tried the same version of firefox package in another linux machine before and when I'm with root account
"sudo -u esolve ./firefox " works fine
what is wrong with this? it is strange
BTW, the user account esolve was created by useradd
maybe this is a problem? coz when I open the terminal, the default shell is /bin/sh
I have to mannually change SHELL=/bin/bash, and even if I put a .bashrc with such a line under homedir,
the .bashrc.doesn't seem to work


coz I need to use "sudo -u esolve ./firefox " in a script, otherwiser I will just switch to esolve and run ./firefox
so I hope to deal with this error

[Roxoff]

sudo -u mean 'run as another user', take a look at the sudo man page.

The syntax should be

sudo -u <username> <application>

which is what you have in the other examples you've provided. If you don't want to provide a username, then drop the '-u' argument altogether.

[esolve]

sorry, my original post ignored the username, now I have modified it, I used sudo -u <username> <application>

[cnamejj]

If you're already "root" you don't need to use "sudo" to execute a program as another user. You can just use "su esolve -c firefox".

[mizzle]

BTW, the user account esolve was created by useradd
maybe this is a problem? coz when I open the terminal, the default shell is /bin/sh
I have to mannually change SHELL=/bin/bash, and even if I put a .bashrc with such a line under homedir,
the .bashrc.doesn't seem to work


coz I need to use "sudo -u esolve ./firefox " in a script, otherwiser I will just switch to esolve and run ./firefox
so I hope to deal with this error

What distro are you running? Default for Linux distros is typically /bin/bash
To change this, you can edit /etc/passwd file using the command 'vipasswd' (as root).

Then, just replace /bin/sh with /bin/bash on the appropriate line. This requires knowledge of vi/vim (depending on distro) which can be a little tricky to use if you've never used it before.

To change default shell for user add, edit /etc/default/useradd (That's what it is in RHEL-based distros, not sure offhand what it might be in debian or others).

[chebarbudo]

If you're already "root" you don't need to use "sudo" to execute a program as another user. You can just use "su esolve -c firefox".

cnamejj is right. I would only add a little option to make sure esolve is loaded with his own profile:

su - esolve -c firefox