vim without the authority to modify the file

I am trying to edit sources.list using vi editor but getting the following error while saving the file:

/etc/apt/sources.list" E212: Can't open file for writing

vi   ubuntu-11.04

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edited Dec 6 '14 at 1:17

Eric Leschinski

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asked   Nov 24 '11 at 7:12

codersofthedark

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9 Answers

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up vote 176 down vote accepted

For some reason the file you are writing to cannot be created or overwritten.
The reason could be that you do not have permission to write in the directory
or the file name is not valid.

Vim has a builtin help system, I just quoted what it says to :h E212. You might want to edit the file as a superuser like sudo vim FILE. Or if you don't want to leave your existing vim session (and know have proper sudo rights), you can issue:

:w !sudo tee % > /dev/null

Which will save the file.

HTH