Fun and games with sudo and Go in Ubuntu 20.04

Whilst reviewing a colleague's documentation, where he was describing how to code in Go, I noticed a discrepancy in the way that things work when one runs a command as a non-root user vs. running as root, via Super User Do ( sudo )

Having downloaded / unpacked Go thusly: -

sudo wget -c https://golang.org/dl/go1.16.6.linux-amd64.tar.gz -O - | sudo tar -xz -C /usr/local

resulting in Go being installed in /usr/local/go with the actual go binary being in /usr/local/go/bin

ls -al /usr/local/go/bin

total 17128
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root     4096 Jul 12 20:04 .
drwxr-xr-x 10 root root     4096 Jul 12 20:01 ..
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root 14072999 Jul 12 20:04 go
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root  3453176 Jul 12 20:04 gofmt

we needed to run a build ( of containerd ) as root, via sudo make and sudo make install

However, this failed: -

cd ~/containerd

sudo make

+ bin/ctr

/bin/sh: 1: go: not found

make: *** [Makefile:219: bin/ctr] Error 127

even though I'd confirmed that go was installed: -

which go

/usr/local/go/bin/go

ls -al `which go`

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 14072999 Jul 12 20:04 /usr/local/go/bin/go

go version

go version go1.16.6 linux/amd64

as I'd previously added it to my PATH via this line in ~/.profile : -

export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/go/bin

Of course, the wrinkle was that I'm running go as root, via sudo ....

This totally helped: -

bash profile works for user but not sudo

specifically the answer that had me validate the PATH in both cases: -

echo 'echo $PATH' | sh

/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games:/usr/local/games:/snap/bin:/usr/local/go/bin

echo 'echo $PATH' | sudo sh 

/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/snap/bin

Note the difference .... ( apart from /usr/games of course ) ?

The answer then had me alias sudo in ~/.bashrc as follows: -

alias sudo='sudo env PATH=$PATH'

validated with: -

alias

alias alert='notify-send --urgency=low -i "$([ $? = 0 ] && echo terminal || echo error)" "$(history|tail -n1|sed -e '\''s/^\s*[0-9]\+\s*//;s/[;&|]\s*alert$//'\'')"'

alias egrep='egrep --color=auto'

alias fgrep='fgrep --color=auto'

alias grep='grep --color=auto'

alias hist='history | cut -c 8-'

alias l='ls -CF'

alias la='ls -A'

alias ll='ls -alF'

alias ls='ls --color=auto'

alias sudo='sudo env PATH=$PATH'

and now the validation works: -

echo 'echo $PATH' | sh

/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games:/usr/local/games:/snap/bin:/usr/local/go/bin

echo 'echo $PATH' | sudo sh 

/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games:/usr/local/games:/snap/bin:/usr/local/go/bin

and, better still, the build works: -

cd ~/containerd/

sudo make

+ bin/ctr
+ bin/containerd
+ bin/containerd-stress
+ bin/containerd-shim
+ bin/containerd-shim-runc-v1
+ bin/containerd-shim-runc-v2
+ binaries

sudo make install

+ install bin/ctr bin/containerd bin/containerd-stress bin/containerd-shim bin/containerd-shim-runc-v1 bin/containerd-shim-runc-v2

which is nice

Also, make me a sandwich .....