hello,

I am writing an R program and as part of the program, I need to create a file. If I use the terminal, I need to use sudo.For instance, sudo cp file.tsv file_copy.txt.But I do not know how to create the sudo command in the code.

if (paste(dirname(inFileName), "/", sep="") != OUTpath ) { # Save a copy of params file to OUTpath for records
OS<- Sys.info()["sysname"] # Get OS type
if (OS=="Windows") { # Use OS-specific copy command
copyCommand<- "copy"
} else {
copyCommand<- "cp"
}

How would I include sudo in the code above? Or is there another way to do it?

Thanks

I have included the all thew code here. I have tried copyCommand<- paste("sudo", "", "cp"), but I get the message below
sudo: no tty present and no askpass program specified
s

if (paste(dirname(inFileName), “/”, sep="") != OUTpath ) {
OS<- Sys.info()[“sysname”] # Get OS type
if (OS==“Windows”) { # Use OS-specific copy command
copyCommand<- “copy”
} else {
copyCommand<- “cp”
}

paramsCopyFn<- sub(".tsv", "_copy.txt", paramsCopyFn, fixed=T)
cmd1<- paste(copyCommand, shQuote(inFileName), shQuote(paramsCopyFn) , sep=" ")
execSystemCmd(cmd1)
}

execSystemCmd<- function(cmd, OS=NULL) {
if (is.null(OS)) OS<- Sys.info()["sysname"] # Get OS type
if (OS=="Windows") { # use OS-secific system shell command wrapper
shell(cmd, translate=TRUE)
} else {
system(cmd)
}

So you want to give a program self-executing root privileges? I don't even know if that's possible, but it sounds like a really bad idea.

This took me two seconds of Googling. It may help:

https://askubuntu.com/questions/4257...nside-a-script

1 members found this post helpful.

Please post code within CODE tags to make it easier to read. And there are two things that come immediately to mind:

1. Read the man page on the sudo command for the correct syntax, and make sure the user you have in mind is in the sudoers file, and that sudo is set up to not prompt that user for a password. Limit that user to a single command (your program), for better security.
2. If you're running this program as root or with sudo...there is no NEED to use sudo again in your program.

Thanks for your replies. I have been reading about sudo and its security issues and I realized that I was using the wrong approach. One does not need to prefix the "cp" command with sudo. On the other hand, I can copy/rename a file in R using the functions copy() and rename()