How to pass alias through sudo

aliasshellsudo

I have an alias that passes in some parameters to a tool that I use often. Sometimes I run as myself, sometimes under sudo. Unfortunately, of course, sudo doesn't recognise the alias.

Does anyone have a hint on how to pass the alias through?

In this case, I have a bunch of options for perl when I'm debugging:

alias pd='perl -Ilib -I/home/myuser/lib -d'

Sometimes, I have to debug my tools as root, so, instead of running:

pd ./mytool --some params

I need to run it under sudo. I've tried many ways:

sudo eval $(alias pd)\; pd ./mytool --some params
sudo $(alias pd)\; pd ./mytool --some params
sudo bash -c "$(alias pd)\; pd ./mytool --some params"
sudo bash -c "$(alias pd); pd ./mytool --some params"
sudo bash -c eval\ "$(alias pd)\; pd ./mytool --some params"
sudo bash -c eval\ "'$(alias pd)\; pd ./mytool --some params'"

I was hoping for a nice, concise way to ensure that my current pd alias was fully used (in case I need to tweak it later), though some of my attempts weren't concise at all. My last resort is to put it into a shell script and put that somewhere that sudo will be able to find. But aliases are soooo handy sometimes, so it is a last resort.

Best Answer

A very elegant solution can be found in the Archlinux-Wiki:

alias sudo='sudo '
# whitespace ---^

works to pass all aliases to sudo.

Source: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Sudo#Passing_aliases

Related Solutions

Linux – Is it possible to alias a hostname in Linux

For those who don't have an account on the forums (or don't wish to login):

if your main issue is not to ping but to ssh, you can create/edit your ~/.ssh/config adding lines like these:

Host fakehost1
  Hostname real-hostname

Host fakehost2
  Hostname real-hostname2

Host fakehost3
  Hostname real-hostname3

Ssh-agent forwarding and sudo to another user

As you mentioned, the environment variables are removed by sudo, for security reasons.

But fortunately sudo is quite configurable: you can tell it precisely which environment variables you want to keep thanks to the env_keep configuration option in /etc/sudoers.

For agent forwarding, you need to keep the SSH_AUTH_SOCK environment variable. To do so, simply edit your /etc/sudoers configuration file (always using visudo) and set the env_keep option to the appropriate users. If you want this option to be set for all users, use the Defaults line like this:

Defaults    env_keep+=SSH_AUTH_SOCK

man sudoers for more details.

You should now be able to do something like this (provided user1's public key is present in ~/.ssh/authorized_keys in user1@serverA and user2@serverB, and serverA's /etc/sudoers file is setup as indicated above):

user1@mymachine> eval `ssh-agent`  # starts ssh-agent
user1@mymachine> ssh-add           # add user1's key to agent (requires pwd)
user1@mymachine> ssh -A serverA    # no pwd required + agent forwarding activated
user1@serverA> sudo su - user2     # sudo keeps agent forwarding active :-)
user2@serverA> ssh serverB         # goto user2@serverB w/o typing pwd again...
user2@serverB>                     # ...because forwarding still works

Best Answer

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Linux – Is it possible to alias a hostname in Linux

Ssh-agent forwarding and sudo to another user

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