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 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

In your example, what is happening is that the redirection portion of the command is not being executed with sudo permissions, therefore you don't have access to write to /root. Your command is the equivalent of "(sudo ls -hal /root/) > /root/test.out" (pseudocode). Since you want the 'ls' and the redirection to execute under the sudo permission you need to pass the entire command to sudo. You can execute 'sudo sh -c "ls -hal /root/ > /root/test.out" ' to write the 'ls' output to the file /root/test.out. Here you are passing the entire command to sudo so that it all executes under sudo privileges.