cd before sudo

When using .sudo within a .cd context, the script breaks, because the cd command is passed to sudo, rather than to the shell, which results in sudo erroring out with sudo: cd: command not found

Currently working around this issue with c.run("sudo [cmd here]"), since I have disabled the password prompt.

[BenSturmfels]

I’ve just been dealing with this issue myself, where I need to run a bunch of sudo commands within the same directory. The workaround I’ve used is to wrap the whole sudo command in a bash -c so that it executes in a shell and repeat the cd for each command:

c.sudo("bash -c 'cd /srv/website && git init --quiet'")
c.sudo("bash -c 'cd /srv/website && git config receive.denyCurrentBranch ignore'")

That’s a bit harder on the eyes, but you could potentially write a function to reduce the repetition.

My understanding is that there’s two related issues here:

1. sudo() seems to just do simple string concatenation, which isn’t quite enough. For example, if you write sudo('sudo whoami && whoami'), this translates to sudo whoami && whoami, of which only the first command has elevated privileges:

$ sudo whoami && whoami
root
ben

sudo() should probably make the whole command run with elevated privileges, more like this:

$ sudo bash -c 'whoami && whoami'
root
root

1. cd is a shell built-in, rather than a program on the $PATH. So it can’t actually be run with the above simple string concatenation version of sudo(). For example:

$ sudo cd /tmp
sudo: cd: command not found

This could also be fixed by wrapping with a shell:

$ sudo bash -c 'cd /tmp'

[golyalpha]

So, we can’t run commands as root (using sudo) in a different directory than our home directory? That doesn’t really make sense, if I’m being entirely honest.

I do understand that every time a c.run or c.sudo call is made, it is essentially run in a new “session”, resulting it it always being run in a new shell.

I also understand that with c.cd() modifies the way the command is constructed such, that cd [dir] && is prefixed to the actual command in c.run.

IMO, all this particular fix would entail is making sure that the cd [dir] && prefix goes before the sudo [cmd], rather than inside (sudo cd [dir] && cmd) like it does now.

As far as I can tell, there shouldn’t be any reason for c.cd and c.sudo to be incompatible with each other.