From: Gregory Seidman <gsslist+ruby@...>
Date: 2008-05-20T04:46:22+09:00
Subject: Re: sudo ruby loosing environment?

On Tue, May 20, 2008 at 04:07:13AM +0900, Trans wrote:
> My Ruby installation is from the Ubuntu package repository. Yesterday,
> I upgraded my system to Heron and since then one of my Ruby scripts
> stopped working. I traced the problem to this:
> 
>   $ ruby -e"p ENV['ROLL_PATH']"
>   "/home/trans/Company/TigerOps/programs"
> 
>   $ sudo ruby -e"p ENV['ROLL_PATH']"
>   nil
> 
> At first I though it might have something to do with sudo itself, but:

Yes, it's sudo. Your test is flawed.

>   $ echo $ROLL_PATH
>   /home/trans/Company/TigerOps/programs
> 
>   $ sudo echo $ROLL_PATH
>   /home/trans/Company/TigerOps/programs

$ROLL_PATH is interpreted by the shell before sudo is ever invoked.

> So that's not it. Anyone have any idea what's going on?
[...]

This is unrelated to Ruby or Ubuntu. This is how sudo works. Read the
sudoers man page, looking for env_keep. You will need to edit the
/etc/sudoers file (with visudo, not directly).

> Thanks,
> T.
--Greg