On Tue 05 Feb 2019 at 08:21:16 (-0500), Greg Wooledge wrote: > On Mon, Feb 04, 2019 at 08:21:40PM -0700, Thomas D Dial wrote: > > When in doubt about questions like this it often is helpful to consult > > man pages, which often are available on the Web if you don't want to > > install the necessary packages that includes them. In this case, if sudo > > is installed, the man page for sudo also will be there, probably along > > with those for sudoers and visudo, although I could be wrong about the > > last. > > The sudoers(5) man page is ridiculously complex, as is the format of > the /etc/sudoers file. For 99% of Debian users, it's also completely > unnecessary to know it. Just make sure your primary user account is in > the sudo group, and you will be able to run ANY command with sudo, being > prompted for your password if you haven't used sudo on that terminal > in the last few minutes.
Sure, but what's the difference between that and opening an xterm with (the overspecified) /bin/su - where you don't have to keep typing a password every few minutes. > You only need to learn this incredibly byzantine file syntax if you want > to do something fancier than that. Or you just copy an example, making your own substitutions. (That's how I learned English on my mother's knee.) Cheers, David.
