shells and pipes

[Todd C. Miller]

In message <B04EF180935DD3119A930008C79117A621CC4C at mail.directvgla.com>
	so spake "Hanson, James J" (JJHanson):

> 2) Redirects and pipes seem to lose the root permissions, anyway
>    around this

Not really.  The shell interprets these before sudo sees the command
so the only way to work around it is to wrap the command in a subshell.
    Eg. sudo sh -c 'echo foo > bar'
Now, for pipes the situation is not so bad since you can just prefix
both ends of the pipe with sudo, eg.
    % sudo tar cf - foo bar glarp | ( cd /home/stuff; sudo tar vxf - )
However, you may find that both sudos are asking for your password at
the same time.  You can pre-authenticate via "sudo -v" before running 
the command to work around this.

> 3) I have aliases configured to do sudi='sudo -u informix', which seems
>    to work fine unless I try to use sudi in a shell script.  Am I forced
>    to source in this alias with every script I attempt this

I'm afraid so.  Of course, you could split out the sudo aliases into
their own file so things are nicely compartmentalized.

 - todd