I brought this up last night, but the suggestions did not help. Basically i have a "thing" i need to run at boot as someone else. init scripts are launched at boot as root, so somewhere in the script, I have to become someone else to execute this "thing". sample thing: su -l LNVAPP008SSH -c "/usr/local/bin/ssh2 -p 32497 -R51180:LNVAPP008:80 -l LNVAPP008SSH n2web043" This works just fine when logged in as root or as the LNVAPP008SSH user from the command line. The ssh has been setup so that this user (LNVAPP008SSH) does not need to pass a password to initiate the ssh tunnel. However, when this is called from a script, it fails trying to look for a password. I am surmizing that the script is still acting as root when it makes the ssh connection. When i put a printenv in the script, it reports me as still being root, not the LNVAPP008SSH user. I also have another situation that I need to apply this too. This seems like it should be something someone else in the world has done before. So any thoughts on this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks Mike