this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2023
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Linux
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why do you want to use sudo? As normal user you can run most of commands. If you are the only one user do not need sudo, use "su" instead with the admin password.
It's bad practice to stay in a root shell because it's easy to screw up and break something. That's why sudo exists.. you only run something privileged if it absolutely has to.
Just to be pedantic you could use su -c "$command"
Can not screw up and break things with sudo?
You also have
sudo -s
, which is similar tosu
.Some distros set up
sudo
by default, and some don't. I started out on Red Hat, back in the 1990s, and I don't believe that they set up sudo by default; the norm there, at least at the time, was tosu
. Ubuntu, as I recall, installssudo
and I believe configures it to grant sudo access to the user account who did the installation. There, the convention is to kindasudo
. I can't recall whether the default is passwordless, though.I don't think that using either is a horrendously bad practice. I tend to set up sudo in password-requiring mode and use
sudo
these days, but I wouldn't blink an eye at usingsu
either.I think that the most-significant security concern with
su
is that you can leave a root shell lying around if you walk away from your computer, and whilesudo
may reduce the frequency with which that happens -- if one is prone to walking away from their computer and leaving it unlocked in the first place -- you can do that withsudo -s
as well, which I certainly use, so...shrugs Plus, if you havesudo
set up with passwordless root access, any shell is functionally a root shell anyway. And, frankly, if someone has physical access to a system, most people don't bother to lock down their system against settinginit=/bin/sh
on the kernel command line in GRUB, passwording their BIOS and restricting it from booting from alternate boot media, etc, so...I am not a sysadmin, jus user since 2000. I think if you ever need to do something with sudo it will be as dangerous as using su.