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philippe
Asked: 2012-06-06 05:27:17 +0800 CST

sudo sourcing user's .bashrc without impacting /root/.bashrc or /etc/bashrc

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Is there any way to make sudo use the user's .bashrc file instead of the root one? I would like to use my own .bashrc while using sudo instead of the one of root or /etc/bashrc (I would have to force other users to use it).

The man page doesn't help much, but I'm sure there is a way to do so.

linux sudo

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    I don't know if that is a very good idea, although I can imagine it to be handy: Inside your sudo environment, you will have the SUDO_USER environment variable set to the name of the user who called sudo. That variable can be used in your /root/.bashrc to achieve what you want.

    Beware, however, that security-wise this can be quite delicate. You should think twice if this cannot somehow be exploited by an untrusted user.

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  2. I know this is old, but in case anyone googles this and finds it.... Configure your own .bashrc as you like (~/.bashrc) Then when you need to use sudo, do it like...

    sudo -E command

    -E tells the superuser to preserve the current environment

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  3. Depending on what you want to do, it may be sufficient to set an environment variable in an alias for sudo. In my case, I was trying to set a different prompt for when I use sudo -s to get a root shell. The following alias in my .bashrc seems to work perfectly:

    alias sudo="PS1='\[\e[0;31m\]\u@\h:\w\[\e[0m\]\\$ ' sudo "
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