Cannot start sublime under sudo

[thatlizarddude]

I am on Mac, and I ran the command sudo su -, so I entered into root mode, and now as a root I executed a command subl file.txt. Sublime has started with a new empty file with no contents, not opening the file at all. I’ve tried opening the file with other text editors like Visual Studio Code and vim which worked fine. When I tried to quit Sublime, it instantly reopened again, and even if it lost focus, it went back again. So I quickly clicked on the console and pressed Ctrl+C to cancel the command, so I could close Sublime Text. If I did sudo subl file.txt, it would open fine, but not under the root. Is this a feature or a bug?

[FichteFoll]

Trying to open subl in su doesn’t work for me at all on Arch. Nothing happens.

subl --help does print the help message, though.

I’m inclined to believe this is a feature, but am not sure why.

[OdatNurd]

On my MacBook running MacOS 10.10.5, I executed the following:

Last login: Mon Sep 18 19:43:05 2017 from dart
tmartin:tmac:~\> sudo su -
tmac:~ root# echo "I am the contents of test.txt" > test.txt
tmac:~ root# subl test.txt

As mentioned above, this starts sublime and opens a window, but does not open the file. However, I can quit Sublime or otherwise lose focus without seeing the behaviour mentioned; it seems to work as per normal except that it doesn’t open the file at all. The same is true if Sublime is already running when I execute the command; it gives the window focus, but does not open the file.

However, the same sequence of steps on my Slackware Linux box opens the file as I would expect it to. If Sublime is already running, it starts a new copy using /root/.config/sublime-text-3 as the configuration directory. Presumably that’s because each user gets their own shared memory handle for communicating with an already running process though.

[kingkeith]

related:

Sudo behavior

How to reproduce: 1. Run sublime with normal privileges 2. Open some files for editing 3. run sudo subl <thisfile> 4. Close tab with NOW: you can File->Open and change any file on system EXPECTED: whole instance of sublime text must not have root rights. Only this tab must have access to edit only and have no access to open others with root privileges EXCEPTION is when whole sublime instance are run with root rights: sudo subl (eg. without file arguments)

Unable to save /etc/hosts

That's because the subl command ends up launching Sublime Text 2 under your user id instead of as root. The only way to do what you want is to do: sudo /Applications/Sublime\ Text\ 2.app/Contents/MacOS/Sublime\ Text\ 2 Note that this will tie up that terminal session until ST2 quits, and that it will be reading prefs from /var/root/Library/Application Support/Sublime Text 2, not your home directory.

Subl does not work via sudo or as root under OS 10.9.1

1st I try it via sudo brandon-mba:~ brandon$ sudo subl Password: Unable to find Sublime Text 2nd I become root and try it via the softlink brandon-mba:~ brandon$ sudo su - brandon-mba:~ root# subl Unable to find Sublime Text brandon-mba:~ root# which subl /usr/local/bin/subl brandon-mba:~ root# /usr/local/bin/subl Unable to find Sublime Text Then I try it via the file, skipping the softlink brandon-mba:~ root# ls -l /usr/local/bin/subl lrwxr-xr-x 1 brandon admin 62 Jan 10 09:5…

[braver]

As mentioned above, this starts sublime and opens a window, but does not open the file.

Same here on 10.12.6. This also fails, with TextEdit starting but failing to open te file:

Koens-MacBook-Pro:~ root# open test.txt
LSOpenURLsWithRole() failed with error -10810 for the file /private/var/root/test.txt

¯_(ツ)_/¯