Comments on: Editing files as root in Ubuntu

By: joseph’s weblog

joseph’s weblog — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 22:04:44 +0000

[...] http://www.kryogenix.org/days/2005/01/09/editing [...]

By: Jonas

Jonas — Sat, 21 Jan 2006 19:08:58 +0000

Perhaps this may help:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=116379
With this launcher it is very easy to open files as root. No hacking required.

By: Senji

Senji — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 +0000

Is it possible to do something along the lines of sticking a shim higher up on the PATH with the same name and tricking Nautilus into doing the right thing as a result?

By: who_me

who_me — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 +0000

Downlod KDE, then visit kde-look.org and obtain their “run as/open as/edit as” root service extensions. This gives you the above as part of a right click.

That wasn’t really helpful, sorry.

By: sil

sil — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 +0000

sigh
I could do it myself by adding a script option to every file, but I don’t want to have to select myself whether to edit it as root or not. I want it to give me the option if it needs to, and not give me the option otherwise, not put a separate “edit this as…” option on everything’s menu.

Senji: I could do that, but then I’d have to have a shim per potential editor I wanted to use, which is nearly the same thing as writing a little shell script to do it and making that the edit action…

By: PeteG

PeteG — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 +0000

Better yet, open it read only (maybe with a subtle warning flag) and then ask for root password if changes are made.

By: sil

sil — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 +0000

PeteG: but that means hacking every potential editor. While I agree that your way is the best for usability, it’s also really hard to do, because applications don’t all save files by calling some OS save() function which I could change.