Bash – Getting Sudo to Work for an Alias

aliasbashpathsudo

I installed Sublime Text 3 in Fedora 20 which has got GNOME, as I couldn't get it being called from terminal I created a .bash_aliases file which a line like this:

alias sublime='sublime_text'

And so also added the sublime_text file location to the PATH by editing .bashrc file adding:

export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/share/applications/sublime-text-3/

However, when I want to edit any file for which I might get sudo privilege first I want to do:

sudo sublime sudoLikelyFile

sudo sublime_text sudoLikelyFile

However I'm getting:

sudo: sublime: command not found

How can I work around for this?

Best Answer

There are two potential problems here.

Firstly, you need to make your shell expand aliases after sudo:

alias sudo='sudo '

From man bash:

If the last character of the alias value is a blank, then the next command word following the alias is also checked for alias expansion.

Secondly, on many distributions, $PATH is not propagated to the new shell by sudo. You can manually change secure_path to add the directory which the sublime_text executable is in:

Defaults secure_path = [...]:/usr/local/share/applications/sublime-text-3

...or you can disable secure_path altogether (note: secure_path makes sure that an attacker cannot change your path and use it to influence the command you will run as root, so consider this carefully):

Defaults !secure_path

Related Solutions

KDE – Using Sudo on GUI Applications in Arch Linux

This looks like an intentional configuration in Arch Linux. See this for discussion with links to solutions.

The best tip there seems to be adding "DISPLAY XAUTHORITY" to to the "env_keep" defaults in /etc/sudoers.

Fedora has in /etc/sudoers the following and this allows sudo somexapp to succeed.

Defaults    env_reset
Defaults    env_keep =  "COLORS DISPLAY HOSTNAME HISTSIZE INPUTRC KDEDIR LS_COLORS"
Defaults    env_keep += "MAIL PS1 PS2 QTDIR USERNAME LANG LC_ADDRESS LC_CTYPE"
Defaults    env_keep += "LC_COLLATE LC_IDENTIFICATION LC_MEASUREMENT LC_MESSAGES"
Defaults    env_keep += "LC_MONETARY LC_NAME LC_NUMERIC LC_PAPER LC_TELEPHONE"
Defaults    env_keep += "LC_TIME LC_ALL LANGUAGE LINGUAS _XKB_CHARSET XAUTHORITY"

Bash – When I run “sudo su” I get –bash: command not found for everything

So, finally I got the answer to your problem.

Your PATH environment variable consists of /usr/local/sbin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/opt/aws/bin:/root/bin.

But, it doesn't contain /usr/bin.

When I do which yum OR which sudo in my CentOS, the output I get is that these executables are located in /usr/bin.

So, the only way I think it'd work is when you'll add /usr/bin to your PATH variable.

PATH=$PATH:/usr/bin; 
export PATH

And for permanent relief from this, add this to /etc/profile in your system.

Mind it that you need superuser privileges to achieve this last step.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

KDE – Using Sudo on GUI Applications in Arch Linux

Bash – When I run “sudo su” I get –bash: command not found for everything

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