Skip to content

x/website: clarify Linux installation instructions regarding root/sudo permissions #73300

@wesleybertipaglia

Description

@wesleybertipaglia

What is the URL of the page with the issue?

https://go.dev/doc/install

What is your user agent?

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/135.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

Screenshot

No response

What did you do?

  1. Follow the official installation instructions for Go on Linux: https://go.dev/doc/install

  2. They attempt to run the command with a single sudo prefix, e.g.:

sudo rm -rf /usr/local/go && tar -C /usr/local -xzf go1.24.2.linux-amd64.tar.gz
  1. The rm command runs with elevated permissions, but tar does not, leading to permission denied errors.

What did you see happen?

The Linux installation instructions may confuse new users into running a combined rm && tar command with a single sudo, causing permission errors during extraction.

The documentation currently says:

(You may need to run the command as root or through sudo).

This can be confusing, as new users often try to run both steps with a single sudo, which only applies to the first command. A small rewording could improve clarity without changing the overall tone.

What did you expect to see?

The Go installation completes successfully without permission errors.

Suggested alternative:

(You may need to run each command separately with the necessary permissions, as root or through sudo).

This makes it clearer that both commands might require elevated permissions individually.

I'd be happy to submit a PR with this change, if appropriate, as a first contribution.

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

No one assigned

    Labels

    DocumentationIssues describing a change to documentation.FixPendingIssues that have a fix which has not yet been reviewed or submitted.FrozenDueToAgeNeedsFixThe path to resolution is known, but the work has not been done.help wantedwebsite

    Type

    No type

    Projects

    No projects

    Relationships

    None yet

    Development

    No branches or pull requests

    Issue actions