Re: Running emacs as root

[Henrik Enberg]

tbonemp3@yahoo.com (Ted Weatherly) writes:

> To run emacs as root, I normally 'su' then 'emacs'.  I'd like to
> create a script to simplify this.  I try:
>
> sudo -u root /bin/sh -c "emacs"
>
> ...and I'm able to edit files as root.  But when I run a shell within
> emacs, my prompt displays as if I'm a regular user (i.e. it shows as
> "/tmp> " but I want "/tmp# ").  So it appears as if emacs is using the
> .profile of the regular user.   How do I fix this?  

sudo doesn't change your environment, you'd have to use su for that.

> Perhaps there is a better way to launch emacs as root?

I use tramp.el (see http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/tramp/) to open
files as root with sudo within the running emacs.  When tramp is
installed simply do "C-x f /sudo:root@localhost:/path/to/file".