Cannot echo "hello" > x.txt even with sudo?

Question

Possible Duplicate:
sudo & redirect output

I'm trying to create a file in /var/www, but even with sudo this fails:

user@debVirtual:/var/www$ sudo echo "hello" > f.txt
-bash: f.txt: Permission denied

When I use sudo nano, I can save something to this file.

Why can't I use sudo echo?

Solution

The redirection is done by the shell before sudo is even started. So either make sure the redirection happens in a shell with the right permissions

sudo bash -c 'echo "hello" > f.txt'

or use tee

echo "hello" | sudo tee f.txt  # add -a for append (>>)

Comments

[Admin]

stackoverflow.com/questions/84882/…

[tatsu]

what if you already used quote and double quote?

[Chris B]

Thanks. Top one didn't work for me on Debian but 2nd option worked perfectly.

[Manachi]

Kind of lengthy + ugly really isn't it.

[WesternGun]

If you need multiple lines as stdin input, use cat <<EOF | sudo tee -a /your/file, and let your input's last line be EOF.