Pipe program output into a protected file using sudo

Question

I want to do the following:

$ echo "secrets" > protected_file

But the the problem is, I don't have file permissions for "protected_file", so I try the following:

$ sudo echo "secrets" > protected_file

But that doesn't work either because only the "echo" portion of the command is executed under sudo.

What's the correct way to do this?

-Geoffrey Lee

Answer 1

sudo bash -c 'echo "secrets" > protected_file'

Answer 2

Try echo 'secrets' | sudo tee filename > /dev/null or echo 'secrets' | sudo tee -a filename > /dev/null if you wish to append.