The Zash Blag

Why is it that so many Ubuntu guides tell you to do sudo gedit /path/to/somefile when there is a sudoedit command? An editor, like Gedit, doesn’t need to run as root, ever.

This is so much better and safer:

SUDO_EDITOR=gedit sudo -e /path/to/somefile

This will …

1. Copy the file to /tmp/
2. Invoke gedit as your user
3. Update the original file if you changed the temporary file

It would of course be really useful if gksudo had this built in already, and could be used in a nice way by nautilus-gksu.