How to keep environment variables when using sudo

Question

When I use any command with sudo the environment variables are not there. For example after setting HTTP_PROXY the command wget works fine without sudo

Answer 1

If you have the need to keep the environment variables in a script you can put your command in a here document like this. Especially if you have lots of variables to set things look tidy this way.

# prepare a script e.g. for running maven
runmaven=/tmp/runmaven$$
# create the script with a here document 
cat << EOF > $runmaven
#!/bin/bash
# run the maven clean with environment variables set
export ANT_HOME=/usr/share/ant
export MAKEFLAGS=-j4
mvn clean install
EOF
# make the script executable
chmod +x $runmaven
# run it
sudo $runmaven
# remove it or comment out to keep
rm $runmaven