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singrium
Asked: 2018-11-10 05:01:42 +0800 CST

What is the difference between sudo and sudo -H? [duplicate]

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Sometimes I see in many websites' tutorials the use of sudo -H + command for example sudo -H gedit /etc/apt/sources.list. However I know that sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list can do the work.
So anyone please can tell me what is the difference between sudo -H and sudo?

command-line permissions sudo

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    The difference comes when e.g. gedit writes a preference file or something similar to $HOME when it is closed. Many programs do that.

    When you run

    sudo gedit ...

    then $HOME is still set to your home directory (say /home/singrium) and gedit will write its settings there but the preferences file will then be owned by root. This might make it difficult to run gedit as your user afterwards because then gedit cannot write its settings due to a lack of permissions.

    When you instead run

    sudo -H gedit ...

    then $HOME will be set to root's home directory (usually /root) and gedit will write its preferences file there without affecting your account.

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  2. sudo -H is the same as sudo --set-home

    -H, --set-home Request that the security policy set the HOME environment variable to the home directory specified by the target user's password database entry. Depending on the policy, this may be the default behavior.

    It avoids the user's home folder permissions to be changed to root.

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  3. From man sudo

    -H' The -H (HOME) option requests that the security policy set the HOME environment variable to the home directory of the target user (root by default) as specified by the password database. Depending on the policy, this may be the default behavior.

    -H gedit in your case will set the $HOME variable to point to root (by default) instead of being your user home dir.

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