Checking if you're running as root

There are different ways of checking if we're running a script as root. We can use environment variables, just as we can use the whoami or id commands to check if it equals root/number 0 or not.

Getting ready

We'll continue using the cli1 machine for this recipe, so make sure that it's powered on.

How to do it…

Let's create a short snippet of Bash shell script code that's going to help us find out whether we're running a script as root or not. It's a rather simple thing to do in Linux, considering that we have easy access to an environment variable called EUID, and reading its value is enough to determine whether we're running as root (EUID=0) or not (EUID value > 1):

#!/bin/bash
# V1.0 / Jasmin Redzepagic / 01/11/2021 Initial script version 
# Distribution allowed under GNU Licence V2.0 
# First, we need to check if our environment variable UID is set to
# 0 or not and branch...