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

[David Morgan]

On 16:54 Wed 06 Jul     , Holly Bostick wrote:
> OK, you all likely realize that I responded before I had got the three
> more messages telling me what to do.
>
> I'm sure it will work (three people telling you the exact same thing is
> pretty convincing ;-) ), but what I don't understand is why/how, if I
> want to
>
> sudo echo 'media-video/xine-ui ~x86' >>/etc/portage/package.keywords
>
> changing that to
>
> "sudo echo media-video/xine-ui ~x86 >>/etc/portage/package.keywords"
>
> is going to write the line
>
> media-video/xine-ui ~x86
>
> to /etc/portage/package.keywords-- i.e., why are the internal quotes no
> longer necessary?
>
> Or should it be
>
> "sudo echo 'media-video/xine-ui ~x86' >>/etc/portage/package.keywords"
>
> or will that *really* screw everything up?
>
> (As you see, my understanding of bash is trying to improve, with only
> very limited success :-) ).
>

Nope, I don't think you can do it with sudo since bash uses whitespace
as a separator, so if you do sudo "echo foo >> bar", it'll look for a
single command "echo foo >> bar", which is not what you want - you want
a command echo with argument foo, and then redirect the output to bar
(the double quotes prevent bash from evaluating the whitespace or the
 >>).

afaik you can only do it with su -c "echo foo >> bar", which stops bash
from doing anything with the >> or the whitespace to begin with, but
then passes everything inside the double quotes to another shell, which
gets started by su -c

It's kind of annoying, I know, but I don't think there's a way round it
with sudo.

Dave

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