Sep 29th, 2009
The visudo command
The visudo command.
The sudo command also provides a comprehensive audit trail. Each successful authentication is
logged to the file /var/log/messages and the command issued along with the issuer’s user name
is logged to the file /var/log/secure.
Another advantage of the sudo command is that an administrator can allow different users access to specific commands based on their needs.
Administrators wanting to edit the sudo configuration file, /etc/sudoers, should use the visudo
command.
To give someone full administrative privileges, type visudo and add a line similar to the following in the user privilege specification section:
and then
This example states that the user, admin, can use sudo from any host and execute any command.
The example below illustrates the granularity possible when configuring sudo:
This example states that any user can issue the command /sbin/shutdown -h now as long as it is issued from the console.
The sudoers file should always be edited by the visudo command which locks the file and does grammatical checking. It is imperative that sudoers be free of syntax errors since sudo will not run with a syntactically incorrect sudoers file.
