python permission denied writing output to file

I want to execute a python file in /var/www/html:

sudo python myFile.py

Which works fine.

Now, I want to write the output to log.txt.

So, I type:

sudo python myFile.py >> log.txt

However, I get the following error:

-bash: log.txt: Permission denied

Though I changed the permissions of log.txt:

sudo chmod u+x log.txt

And ls -l log.txt returns:

-rwxr--r-- 1 www-data www-data 0 Feb 3 16:04 log.txt

How can I fix this?

2 Answers

The problem here sudo python myFile.py >> log.txt is that you run sudo python myFile.py as root, but your shell is still running as your regular user, which means >> redirection won't work if you don't have permission to write to the log.txt

As George properly noted, you should do sudo bash -c "python myFile.py >> log.txt". Alternatively, if your myFile.py doesn't require root privileges, you can do python myFile.py | sudo tee log.txt

Two options I can think of:

1. sudo bash -c "python myFile.py >> log.txt", or

2. sudo chmod u+x myFile.py, then sudo ./myFile.py >> log.txt