Modifying the Path To Include sbin

Posted 10-3-2010 by Matthew Downey

If you are running Red Hat or CentOS and have added a user to /etc/sudoers, you may be perplexed by the fact that you cannot run ifconfig with sudo:

[matt@localhost ~]$ sudo ifconfig
sudo: ifconfig: command not found

This is because /sbin is not in the current user's path. If we run the following command, it works:

[matt@localhost ~]$ sudo /sbin/ifconfig
eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 08:00:27:6E:BC:67  
          inet addr:192.168.1.114  Bcast:192.168.1.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          inet6 addr: fe80::a00:27ff:fe6e:bc67/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:576 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:528 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 
          RX bytes:73739 (72.0 KiB)  TX bytes:42611 (41.6 KiB)

lo        Link encap:Local Loopback  
          inet addr:127.0.0.1  Mask:255.0.0.0
          inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
          UP LOOPBACK RUNNING  MTU:16436  Metric:1
          RX packets:1148 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:1148 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 
          RX bytes:1945296 (1.8 MiB)  TX bytes:1945296 (1.8 MiB)

The solution is to modify the user's .bash_profile and add /sbin to the user's path. We might as well add /usr/sbin to the path, too, to avoid other surprises. Open up .bash_profile with your favorite text editor, and find the following line:

PATH=$PATH:$HOME/bin

Modify it so it looks like this:

PATH=$PATH:$HOME/bin:/sbin:/usr/sbin

Save the file, and logout of GNOME and then log back in. Now sudo ifconfig should behave as expected.

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