PATH environment variable in sudo

Using sudo is a common, safe and recommended method to execute commands that require superuser privileges. However, this command resets the PATH environment variable. So, some badly written installation scripts that require a particular PATH will fail in strange ways when run as sudo.

Here is some useful information about sudo and the PATH environment variable:

• To ensure safety, sudo by default does not use the PATH environment variable of the user or that of root.

• sudo also ignores the system-wide environment variables set in /etc/environment or in /etc/profile.d/*.sh.

• The PATH variable for sudo is hardcoded to /usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games:/usr/local/games

• If you really want sudo to pick up the system-wide PATH or other environment variables, then try this:

  1. Set the PATH or environment variable in a new file named /etc/profile.d/name_anything.sh using export
  2. Start root shell using sudo su -
  3. Check if your path is correct: echo $PATH
  4. Run the command that requires superuser privilege.

Reference:

• Environment variables documentation for Ubuntu
• sudoers man page, look for env_reset

Tried with: Ubuntu 14.04