There may be times, especially if you are a system administrator, when you would like to give a user more access to the computer, but not actually root authority. This can be done by modifying the
/etc/sudoers
file and having your users invoke the sudo
command.
The following steps should not harm your system. We will perform these with a user account made above. You will need to be the root user for this section.
Here we will work with the /etc/sudoers
file:
Make a backup copy of your
/etc/sudoers file
:cp /etc/sudoers /tmp/sudoers.orig
You don’t edit this file directly, the
visudo
command is used. This is poorly named as any text editor can be used if you export theEDITOR
variable accordingly. Set the variable if desired then run the command:visudo
This command makes a temporary copy of the
sudoers
file and edits it. If all goes well it then copies the temporary file over the original when you are done. So, let’s take a look...