How do I use sudo to redirect output to a location I don't have permission to write to?

Question

I\'ve been given sudo access on one of our development RedHat linux boxes, and I seem to find myself quite often needing to redirect output to a location I don\'t normally h

Answer 1

Yet another variation on the theme:

sudo bash <<EOF
ls -hal /root/ > /root/test.out
EOF

Or of course:

echo 'ls -hal /root/ > /root/test.out' | sudo bash

They have the (tiny) advantage that you don't need to remember any arguments to sudo or sh/bash

Answer 2

Maybe you been given sudo access to only some programs/paths? Then there is no way to do what you want. (unless you will hack it somehow)

If it is not the case then maybe you can write bash script:

cat > myscript.sh
#!/bin/sh
ls -hal /root/ > /root/test.out 

Press ctrl + d :

chmod a+x myscript.sh
sudo myscript.sh

Hope it help.

Answer 3

Whenever I have to do something like this I just become root:

# sudo -s
# ls -hal /root/ > /root/test.out
# exit

It's probably not the best way, but it works.

Answer 4

A trick I figured out myself was

sudo ls -hal /root/ | sudo dd of=/root/test.out

Answer 5

The problem is that the command gets run under sudo, but the redirection gets run under your user. This is done by the shell and there is very little you can do about it.

sudo command > /some/file.log
`-----v-----'`-------v-------'
   command       redirection

The usual ways of bypassing this are:

• Wrap the commands in a script which you call under sudo.

  If the commands and/or log file changes, you can make the script take these as arguments. For example:

  sudo log_script command /log/file.txt
  

• Call a shell and pass the command line as a parameter with -c

  This is especially useful for one off compound commands. For example:

  sudo bash -c "{ command1 arg; command2 arg; } > /log/file.txt"
  

Answer 6

Clarifying a bit on why the tee option is preferable

Assuming you have appropriate permission to execute the command that creates the output, if you pipe the output of your command to tee, you only need to elevate tee's privledges with sudo and direct tee to write (or append) to the file in question.

in the example given in the question that would mean:

ls -hal /root/ | sudo tee /root/test.out

for a couple more practical examples:

# kill off one source of annoying advertisements
echo 127.0.0.1 ad.doubleclick.net | sudo tee -a /etc/hosts

# configure eth4 to come up on boot, set IP and netmask (centos 6.4)
echo -e "ONBOOT=\"YES\"\nIPADDR=10.42.84.168\nPREFIX=24" | sudo tee -a /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth4

In each of these examples you are taking the output of a non-privileged command and writing to a file that is usually only writable by root, which is the origin of your question.

It is a good idea to do it this way because the command that generates the output is not executed with elevated privileges. It doesn't seem to matter here with echo but when the source command is a script that you don't completely trust, it is crucial.

Note you can use the -a option to tee to append append (like >>) to the target file rather than overwrite it (like >).