Allowing a script (non-privileged) user to execute privileged commands on Linux

Quite often scripts that are performed by non-privileged users (as they always should where possible) will need to perform a privileged action such as reload a service.

In order to do this 'as securely' as possible we can employ sudo - and telling sudo that the user can run the command xyz as the 'root' user and nothing else.

To do this we need to edit the sudoers file:

vi /etc/sudoers

and add the following line

myusername ALL = (root) NOPASSWD: /usr/sbin/service myservice reload