Honor aliases when using sudo?

Question

I have two aliases set up in my .bash_profile. I want sudo to honor both of them:

$ cat ~/.bash_profile
export EDITOR=emacs
...
alias yum="dnf"
alias ssh="ssh -2"
...

I know how to tell sudo to honor my environment (-E), but I can't find the option for aliases. Searching the man page for alias results in Pattern not found.

How do I tell sudo to honor my aliases?

Thanks in advance.

---

I'm trying to avoid these annoying messages due to Fedora changing commands:

$ sudo yum update
[sudo] password for: 
Yum command has been deprecated, redirecting to '/usr/bin/dnf update'.
See 'man dnf' and 'man yum2dnf' for more information.
...

Answer 1

sudo can't really "honor" aliases, as they're a shell-specific feature – the only way sudo could know about them if it was taught how to read ~/.bashrc, ~/.zshrc, ~/.cshrc... by itself.

For ordinary aliases, you can trick the shell itself into expanding them when followed by sudo:

alias sudo="sudo "

(It's sort-of documented somewhere.)

But for functions, there is nothing similar; you'll have to use the interactive sudo -sE mode instead.

Answer 2

Another possible solution to your problem is to put your aliases, as usual, in your file /home/YourName/.bash_aliases, and then to link that file into root's home directory:

      sudo ln -s /home/YourName/.bash_aliases /root/.bash_aliases

This should work automatically because most distros have these lines in the .bashrc file you are given by default,

      if [ -f ~/.bash_aliases ]; then
          . ~/.bash_aliases
      fi

If you do not have them, it is easy to add them.