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

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 have write access to.

The trouble is, this contrived example doesn't work:

sudo ls -hal /root/ > /root/test.out

I just receive the response:

-bash: /root/test.out: Permission denied

How can I get this to work?

Answer 1

Your command does not work because the redirection is performed by your shell which does not have the permission to write to /root/test.out. The redirection of the output is not performed by sudo.

There are multiple solutions:

• Run a shell with sudo and give the command to it by using the -c option:

  sudo sh -c 'ls -hal /root/ > /root/test.out'
  

• Create a script with your commands and run that script with sudo:

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

  Run sudo ls.sh. See Steve Bennett's answer if you don't want to create a temporary file.

• Launch a shell with sudo -s then run your commands:

  [nobody@so]$ sudo -s
  [root@so]# ls -hal /root/ > /root/test.out
  [root@so]# ^D
  [nobody@so]$
  

• Use sudo tee (if you have to escape a lot when using the -c option):

  sudo ls -hal /root/ | sudo tee /root/test.out > /dev/null
  

  The redirect to /dev/null is needed to stop tee from outputting to the screen. To append instead of overwriting the output file (>>), use tee -a or tee --append (the last one is specific to GNU coreutils).

Thanks go to Jd, Adam J. Forster and Johnathan for the second, third and fourth solutions.

Answer 2

Someone here has just suggested sudoing tee:

sudo ls -hal /root/ | sudo tee /root/test.out > /dev/null

This could also be used to redirect any command, to a directory that you do not have access to. It works because the tee program is effectively an "echo to a file" program, and the redirect to /dev/null is to stop it also outputting to the screen to keep it the same as the original contrived example above.

Answer 3

A trick I figured out myself was

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

Answer 4

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"
  

• Arrange a pipe/subshell with required rights (i.e. sudo)

  # Read and append to a file
  cat ./'file1.txt' | sudo tee -a '/log/file.txt' > '/dev/null';
  
  # Store both stdout and stderr streams in a file
  { command1 arg; command2 arg; } |& sudo tee -a '/log/file.txt' > '/dev/null';
  

Answer 5

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