Reset sudo env vars

kmdodrill

Hi there,

I recently needed to run some commands for qmk (keyboard controller firmware). Their guide described the commands (which worked), but the flashing software wasn't able to detect my keyboard without sudo.

However, sudo's path is different from the user. Therefore, I looked up online some solutions to this.

Stupidly, I ran this command (without knowing how to go back...) sudo env "PATH=$PATH" <command>. I assumed this would use my current path for only the command, but it instead set the sudo path to my current users' path.

How do I change this back to what is in /etc/sudoers? Do I really need to? I saw more information about - seems like it would be insecure to keep it like how it is now (if anyone could explain that to me, I would be grateful).

Thank you.

dbarron

It's a one time thing. It doesn't set anything permanently. Or it didn't used to, I will validate that by reading the man page.

kmdodrill

@dbarron Not sure about the man page , I'll check that. However, sudo echo $PATH echoes out the path that was set through that command, even after restart.

dbarron

Sudo takes the environment variables of the target (root in this case, I presume) unless the security policy prevents that.

I'm not sure what files the security policy refers to, but I don't believe it's intrinsic in the sudoers file. Upon further reading I believe this to be sudo.conf (which didn't exist back when I contributed to the code base). Probably would be in /etc/.