Posted on April 15, 2023 by nexonhost
How To Understand Sudo Command.
In this tutorial, we will explain how to use the sudo command.
Using sudo instead of login in as root is more secure because you can grant limited administrative privileges to individual users without them knowing the root password
The sudo command allows you to run programs as another user, by default the root user. If you spend a lot of time on the command line, sudo is one of the commands that you will use quite frequently.
Installing Sudo (sudo command not found)
The sudo package is pre-installed on most Linux distributions.
To check whether the sudo package is installed on your system, open up your console, type sudo, and press Enter. If you have sudo installed the system, will display a short help message. Otherwise, you will see something like sudo command not found.
If sudo is not installed you can easily install it using the package manager of your distro.
Install Sudo on Ubuntu and Debian
apt install sudo
Install Sudo on CentOS and Fedora
yum install sudo
Adding User to Sudoers
By default, on most Linux distributions granting sudo access is as simple as adding the user to the sudo group defined in the sudoers file . Members of this group will be able to run any command as root. The name of the group may differ from distribution to distribution.
On RedHat based distributions such as CentOS and Fedora, the name of the sudo group is wheel. To add the user to the group , run:
usermod -aG wheel username
On Debian, Ubuntu, and their derivatives, members of the group sudo are granted with sudo access:
usermod -aG sudo username
The root user account in Ubuntu is disabled by default for security reasons, and users are encouraged to perform system administrative tasks using sudo. The initial user created by the Ubuntu installer is already a member of the sudo group, so if you are running Ubuntu, chances are that the user you are logged in as is already granted with sudo privileges.
To allow a specific user to run only certain programs as sudo, instead of adding the user to the sudo group, add the users to the sudoers file.
For example, to allow the user nexonhost to run only the mkdir command as sudo, type:
sudo visudo
and append the following line:
nexonhost ALL=/bin/mkdir
On most systems, the visudo command opens the /etc/sudoers file with the vim text editor. If you don’t have experience with vim, check our article about how to save a file and quit the vim editor .
You can also allow users to run sudo commands without entering the password :
nexonhost ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL
How to Use Sudo
The syntax for the sudo command is as follows:
sudo OPTION.. COMMAND
The sudo command has many options that control its behavior, but usually, it is used in its most basic form, without any option.
To use sudo, simply prefix the command with sudo:
sudo command
Where command is the command for which you want to use sudo.
Sudo will read the /etc/sudoers file and check whether the invoking user is granted with sudo assess. The first time you use sudo in a session, you will be prompted to enter the user password, and the command will be executed as root.
For example, to list all files in the /root directory you would use:
sudo ls /root
[sudo] password for linuxize: . .. .bashrc .cache .config .local .profile
Password Timeout
By default, sudo will ask you to enter your password again after five minutes of sudo inactivity. You can change the default timeout by editing the sudoers file. Open the file with visudo:
sudo visudo
Set the default timeout by adding the line below, where 10 is the timeout specified in minutes:
Defaults timestamp_timeout=10
If you want to change the timestamp only for a specific user, add the following line, where user_name is the user in question.
Defaults:user_name timestamp_timeout=10
Run a Command as a User Other than Root
There is a wrong perception that sudo is used only to provide root permissions to a regular user. Actually, you can use sudo to run a command as any user.
The -u option allows you to run a command as a specified user.
In the following example, we are using sudo to run the whoami command as a user “richard”:
sudo -u richard whoami
The whoami command will print the name of the user running the command:
richard
How to Redirect with Sudo
If you try to redirect the output of a command to a file that your user has no write permissions, you will get a “Permission denied” error.
sudo echo "test" > /root/file.txt
bash: /root/file.txt: Permission denied
This happens because the redirection “>” of the output is performed under the user you are logged in, not the user specified with sudo. The redirection happens before the sudo command is invoked.
One solution is to invoke a new shell as root by using sudo sh -c:
sudo sh -c 'echo "test" > /root/file.txt'
Another option is to pipe the output as a regular user to the tee command , as shown below:
echo "test" | sudo tee /root/file.txt
Conclusion
You have learned how to use the sudo command and how to create new users with sudo privileges.