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On Linux, 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.

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    Two possibilities: 1) You are not in the sudo-ers file (although one would think sudo would give the error). More likely, 2) sudo is configured to run commands not as root, but another user.
    – Breakthrough
    Nov 13, 2012 at 23:01
  • @Breakthrough I meant a user that is a sudoer, of course.
    – Desmond Hume
    Nov 13, 2012 at 23:05
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    sudo date > file Doesn't open the file as root. It opens the file and redirects the output of sudo date to that file.
    – David Schwartz
    Nov 13, 2012 at 23:32
  • @DavidSchwartz sudo (date > file) you suggested results in syntax error near unexpected token 'date'.
    – Desmond Hume
    Nov 13, 2012 at 23:35
  • date |sudo tee file
    – zb'
    Nov 13, 2012 at 23:39

2 Answers 2

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sudo only makes the sudo'ed command run as root. An occasional practical difference is that, in

sudo echo mem > /sys/power/state

(which tells the kernel to suspend-to-RAM)

it doesn't work because the shell you're running in (as an ordinary user) tries to set up the redirection to /sys/power/state, which it does not have write permission to. You can do this successfully by running a sub-shell as root

sudo sh -c 'echo mem > /sys/power/state'

or by using a program that opens files itself, such as dd:

echo mem | sudo dd of=/sys/power/state

or by getting a root shell first, using e.g. 'su' or 'sudo -s'.

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Does sudo really make you root for a while?

The man page for sudo explains:

There is no easy way to prevent a user from gaining a root shell if that user is allowed to run arbitrary commands via sudo.

Thus, if you run sudo something and type in your password; then, if you don't lock your terminal another user will be able to run sudo su - within 5 minutes which will give him access to the root shell, if your sudo allows you to run arbitrary commands. For more on the timeout, I'm going to quote this relevant section from the above man page:

The sudoers policy caches credentials for 5 minutes, unless overridden in sudoers. By running sudo with the -v option, a user can update the cached credentials without running a command.

Why do I get permission denied?

sudo can not tamper with how bash works, which is why it can't deal well with features like file redirection and other features that work outside of the command. To avoid this you will have to ask a root shell to execute the full command, such that it does forward the redirection character to a rooted environment instead of parsing it.

As shown by the other user, this is as simple as running

sudo bash -c 'date > file'

or rewriting it such that you do not need the redirection parameter to be run as root, like so:

date | sudo tee file
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