How to invoke sudo and keeping user's environment variables

[istoyanov]

This might go as well into the general help forum, but since my question is about using "sudo", I decided to post it here.

I have installed some local software (actually TeXLive2008, by using sudo ./install-tl[1]) and added the installed binaries to the path (using ~/.profile). Sofar everything runs OK, but when I try to upgrade the TeX distribution through the tlmgr script[2] by prepending sudo to the command, it seems that the shell doesn't get the existing $PATH and the command isn't found. However, when I run tlmgr as a regular user it complains about missing rights.

My question is: how should I run the (local) binaries through sudo, but keeping the environment of the user? What would be the *recommended* way doing this?

[1] http://www.tug.org/texlive/quickinstall.html
[2] http://www.tug.org/texlive/tlmgr.html

NOTE: I have *no* root account active as per Ubuntu's defaults

[Sarmacid]

Check outman sudo
-E The -E (preserve environment) option will override the env_reset option in sudoers(5))

[istoyanov]

Thank you, Sarmacid, but the proposed sudo option didn't help:

me@ubuntubox:~$ sudo -E tlmgr
sudo: tlmgr: command not found

[s3gfault]

how about just sudo ./tlmgr

[istoyanov]

I suppose that this would run OK (after cd to the container directory), but once things start to get installed I'd need a unchanged environment anyway...

Thanks for the suggestion, though!

[Sarmacid]

You can add that folder to the path in a temporary root shell

sudo -i
PATH=$PATH:/path/to/files

But taking a look at one of the links, you shouldn't have root issues, and should install it as a regular user

You do not need to be root (administrator on Windows) to install, run, or manage TeX Live. We strongly recommend installing it as a normal user.

[istoyanov]

The default option was to install everything to /usr/local/texlive/2008/$SUBDIRS, so I *had* to install via sudo. This way I hit the troubles, but I'll try to reach an Ubuntu-friendly way upgrading the TeXLive distribution.

Thanks for now! Once I have tested, I'll report back.

[s3gfault]

In that case, I may suggest something like this, where localuser is replaced by your username:

sudo chown -hR localuser /usr/local/texlive/2008

[istoyanov]

After some experimenting, I decided to chown the whole directory to an ordinary user (following s3gfault's suggestion) and not to mess with sudo at all. Everything works OK for now :D

Thank you all for the suggestions!