[gentoo-user] sudo echo cannot write to /etc/ files ?

[Holly Bostick]

Hey, ho--

Here's (one of) today's non-critical problems that's getting on my
nerves, so hopefully somebody can help.

I've finally got around to setting up sudo. It works fine, except for
one thing.

I don't just give myself blanket permissions to sudo to all commands; I
made a Cmd_Alias group which includes a lot of utility apps. And, like
many of you, I included emerge in this group.

But a lot of the time, when I do an emerge -av, I find that there's a
USE flag I want or don't want for the package, or I want an unstable
version, or whatever, which means I have to echo to one of the files in
/etc/portage.

Echo is in the sudo-ed group, and echo isn't the problem-- the problem
is that permission is refused to write to the file itself (which is an
error *from* echo, so it would seem that echo itself is OK as far as
sudo goes). Which means that I have to su anyway, to echo to the file,
which really isn't the point of the exercise.

As I see it, this error can mean only one of two things:

sudo does not give me a login shell (so my UID is 'really' still my UID
and not root's, and I don't have permission to write to the file); or

there is another, "invisible" cli utility responsible for actually
writing to the file, which is not sudo-ed.

Or could it be something else?

In any case, does anybody know how I could fix this? It's really
screwing up my useability, which was just starting to shape up nicely :-) .

Thanks,
Holly
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