Write With Sudo

- One minute read - 85 words - Page Source

A snippet that I find myself needing more often than I’d like to admit - when you’ve opened a file for editing in vim, but when you go to save you are reminded that it needs root permissions to do so.

:w !sudo tee %

This translates to:

  • :w - “write this file1 to…”
  • ! _ “…the stdin of the following command:”
  • tee % - “the command tee, passed as argument <the filename currently being edited>”

  1. Technically I think “this buffer” might be more accurate? ↩︎