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su
The su (substitute user) command can be used to impersonate other users on the system. su is provided by the sys-apps/shadow package. It is also included with the sys-apps/util-linux package, but it is disabled in the ebuild to prevent a file collision with sys-apps/shadow.
Usage
su will run commands as root by default. Since not specifying a username will cause su to ask for root privileges, the following command will run as root and halt the system:
user $su -c 'shutdown -h now'It is best practice to encapsulate the commands following the
-c option with either single or double quotes.It is also possible to specify a user other than root to substitute commands. The following example will run the command echo as the user larry:
user $su -c 'echo "Moo to the Gentoo Wiki reader out there!"' larry