How to keep environment variables when using sudo

linux environment-variables sudo
Ahmed Aswani picture Ahmed Aswani · Dec 26, 2011 · Viewed 315.9k times · Source

When I use any command with sudo the environment variables are not there. For example after setting HTTP_PROXY the command wget works fine without sudo. However if I type sudo wget it says it can't bypass the proxy setting.

Answer

Employed Russian picture Employed Russian · Dec 26, 2011

First you need to export HTTP_PROXY. Second, you need to read man sudo carefully, and pay attention to the -E flag. This works:

$ export HTTP_PROXY=foof
$ sudo -E bash -c 'echo $HTTP_PROXY'

Here is the quote from the man page:

-E, --preserve-env
             Indicates to the security policy that the user wishes to preserve their
             existing environment variables.  The security policy may return an error
             if the user does not have permission to preserve the environment.

Related questions

How do I delete an exported environment variable?

Before installing gnuplot, I set the environment variable GNUPLOT_DRIVER_DIR = /home/gnuplot/build/src. During the installation, something went wrong. I want to remove the GNUPLOT_DRIVER_DIR environment variable. How can I achieve it?

Read More
How to set the environmental variable LD_LIBRARY_PATH in linux

I have first executed the command: export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib Then I have opened .bash_profile file: vi ~/.bash_profile. In this file, I put: LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib export LD_LIBRARY_PATH Then if …

Read More
How to add a default include path for GCC in Linux?

I'd like gcc to include files from $HOME/include in addition to the usual include directories, but there doesn't seem to be an analogue to $LD_LIBRARY_PATH. I know I can just add the include directory at command line …

Read More