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On Ubuntu, in what kind of situations, if any, running a command as a non-root to access a file/folder or create/delete a file/folder using sudo may result in "permission denied" while running the same command as root user would succeed? The user is assumed to be a sudoer, of course.

Practical example on Ubuntu 12: I've got this directory in / with root:root ownership and drwxr-xr-x permissions and I tried sudo date > file while in it as well as sudo date | tee file but got the same

-bash: file: Permission denied

in both cases. Sure enough, there're no problems if I'm root. This is quite frustrating.

Evandro Silva
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Desmond Hume
  • 666

2 Answers2

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What's the command you are trying? A common mistake is sudo foo > output which doesn't run the output redirection as root because it's done by the shell. A solution to this one would be foo | sudo tee output (or sudo foo | sudo tee output if foo requires root access)

Dennis Kaarsemaker
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sudo lets you run a program as another user - as root by default.

It's the same as if root runs that program (except maybe for some environment variables and such). So there is no such situation.

Florian Diesch
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