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up vote 4 down vote favorite

I've been updating some of the default profile for bash, and saw from the tutorials I was following that I could reload the new profile with the new environment settings by using:

source /etc/bash.bashrc

The only thing is - the new environment variables were only available to my current user - and were ignored when I used sudo. They only became available to sudo when I closed my terminal session and rejoined.

When I try to use:

sudo source /etc/bash.bashrc

I get the error:

sudo: source: command not found

Is there a simple way to load in the new bash profile settings for sudo without having to close the terminal and restart?

-- Initially, I was using some installer scripts which referenced the variables. I found that while they could access the variables when I called the scripts directly (although, this would cause a later problem with creating directories as I needed to be root), calling the install scripts using sudo wouldn't.

I proved this by testing with these simple commands:

echo $ENV_VARIABLE
sudo echo $ENV_VARIABLE

The first would output the variable's value, but the second wouldn't output anything.

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How did you try to use the variables from sudo ? Please note that if you use "sudo command $variable" it will replace the variable from your shell, not from sudo's environment. – João Pinto Jan 10 '11 at 22:57

3 Answers

up vote 6 down vote accepted

The problem is that source is a bash build-in command (not a program - like ls or grep). I think one approach is to login as root and then execute the source command.

sudo -s
source /etc/bash.bashrc
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2  
You're right that the problem is that source is a shell builtin. sudo su is a kind of weird way to say it -- better to just say sudo -s which is sudo's own way of saying "start a shell as this user." Your one-line version won't work because each of the commands in it is run by the main user's shell in a separate subprocess. – poolie Jan 10 '11 at 22:58
1  
Right. Plus BASH reads /etc/bashrc at login time. So you may as well use 'su' with -, -l, or --login switch in order to get the environment of that user: 'sudo su -' to become root or 'su - $username' to become another user. – user8290 Jan 10 '11 at 23:21
The "one line" example won't work because su starts a new shell and "source" is run only after it terminates. The first example only works if the second line used inside the root shell. – loevborg Jan 11 '11 at 9:41
Thanks for the comments guys! – Marcos Roriz Jan 11 '11 at 13:53
sudo -s is no better than sudo su. It won't have any effect either way. – loevborg Jan 11 '11 at 13:58
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up vote 1 down vote

As Marcos says, your main problem here is that source is a shell builtin command that affects only the shell process in which it's run.

The easy solution is to just start a new shell as root, and bash will automatically read /etc/bash.bashrc when it starts. That's as simple as just saying

sudo bash
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up vote 1 down vote

Closing and reopening the terminal should not change things. By default, sudo strips the environment. To disable that, add -E to sudo.

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