Ran across an issue I’ve encountered many times before and finally decided it was irritating enough to research. Something I’ve occasionally wanted to do is apply an operation as sudo to a number of files in a directory or group of directories. The easiest example is listing all the files of a given type from a group of directories.
If elevated privileges aren’t required, ls **/*.py will list all the python files in every subdirectory of a given location. However, sudo ls **/*.py will fail with the error that File *.py not found.. A bit of reading revealed that this happens because the action of globbing occurs before the call to sudo happens, so calling sudo doesn’t help to reveal any of the files in inaccessible folders. The way to correct this is to call the ls **/*.py file in a subshell and use sudo to launch the subshell, like so: sudo zsh -c ‘ls **/*.py’. This will run the command as sudo and let the shell do the globbing with the correct privileges. Lesson learned, need to remember to run more commands as subshells!