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ergoemacs / ergoemacs-mode

ergoemacs-mode
ergoemacs.github.io/
GNU General Public License v3.0
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sudo with ergoemacs causes .emacs to be owned by root #446

Closed ceridwen closed 3 years ago

ceridwen commented 7 years ago

When I use sudo with my user account to use emacs to edit system configuration files, afterwards .emacs will be owned by root and ergoemacs mode will start throwing errors because it can't write to it. I'm guessing this happens because ergoemacs mode writes to .emacs on close, even if I didn't make any configuration changes.

mattfidler commented 7 years ago

Hm. That could be a problem. I will look into it.

mattfidler commented 7 years ago

Do you know if there is a way to detect if you are using sudo under emacs?

mattfidler commented 7 years ago

Perhaps on most unix systems, if /etc/sudoers is writable, you will have sudo access. I am unsure about this, since I don't currently have access to a linux system where I have sudo access.

ceridwen commented 7 years ago

I don't know about emacs in particular, but there are a number of methods to check for sudo specifically or whether you have root privileges in general, with varying degrees of robustness. sudo is not part of the POSIX standard to my knowledge so implementations may vary. On my Ubuntu system, the environment variables SUDO_COMMAND, SUDO_USER, SUDO_UID, and SUDO_GID are set when I'm running a command with sudo. These could be faked, but for this purpose, I'm not sure that matters. You can use geteuid and getuid to detect whether a user has switched user ids after logging in, though this will catch non-sudo uses too. You can use sudo to run a command as a different user, not root, too, but that could still potentially modify .emacs to be owned by another user depending on what permissions are set on the original user's .emacs.

mattfidler commented 3 years ago

Reopen if you have issues on the new github version