Spyke
Hawkereply
lemmy.world

… but why? “sudo -i” is a thing. Why get another program involved?

44

Some people think before they type. They also do not think mindlessly typing "sudo" before every fucking line in bash is a valid substitute for knowing what they do. Many of them have been doing so for decades on HPUX, Solaris, BSDs and IRIX on their own and other people's/companies machines, not just on their single bedroom machine.

9
programming.dev

It's easier to just call su once and run every single command as root rather than having to randomly use sudo for some commands and not for others (/s if it's not obvious)

6
Hawkereply
lemmy.world

But you can do that without involving ‘su’.

6

I don't use sudo.
Ever.
It's disabled by default in slackware, and I don't know why it's even there.

7
Hawkereply
lemmy.world

Is this some kind of joke going over my head or something?

Run “sudo -i” then run “rm -rf --no-preserve-root”

14
lemmy.zip

I've seen that piece, mostly in beginner instructions, for a root shell. But does it even make sense? Why run a elevated su? Just run su.

2

I think some distros don't expose or create a root password and make you do sudo su. I might be wrong.

2

Shut the front door!


In a lot of situations it's actually bad to use sudo because it can impact settings that make programs or file ownership go to root instead of the user.

54
B-TR3Ereply
feddit.org

You've got to be a damn idiot jumping over his own shadow to get that done. How would you even do that? Running

chown -R root.root

over directories or mount points? Deleting files in /dev or /run and recreating them using "touch" without looking up ownerships before? I wrote "touch" because anyone proceeding to "mknod" would at least have read some man pages. BTW, you'd need su for that rather than sudo.

-2
lemmy.ml

But rm -fr / * seems not to work for removing the French language pack. Can someone confirm if it works with sudo?

41
plateeereply
piefed.social

Ah, I see your problem, you need to add --no-preserve-root.

See the French are super into wine - and grape vines are notoriously hard to get rid of, so if you want to really get rid of the French language pack, you need to rip that grapevine out by the root (e.g. don't preserve the root). Otherwise, the French language pack will just grow back harder and Frenchier than before.

Sacrebleu!

18

Don’t need sudo if you’re always root.

Now excuse me. I need to call the bank and find out why my checking account is suddenly $0.

19

And yet half the time when I'm root I preface with sudo. I can't stop myself!

4
olio.cafe

IMO the "year of the Linux desktop" will come when distros are designed for people who shouldn't even be allowed to use sudo.

17
WFHreply
lemmy.zip

Let me introduce you to atomic distros.

I moved my father on Bluefin 1.5 years ago from his antique MacBook Air. He doesn't know sudo exists. He has never heard of ujust. He doesn't even command line. He hasn't had to do a single update because it all happens in the background. He just.. uses it.

20
Skullgridreply
lemmy.world

doesn't even have to be atomic, I rescued my wife's shit laptop using Ubuntu Mate (snaps booing in background) and she has never seen the command line unless I open it. It's been like that for over a year at least.

4

Yes, but contrary to atomic distros, it's not explicitely designed to be as administration free as possible.

6
feddit.org

I once did a HackTheBox where the privilege escalation weakness was a cronjob running a script. I'm not sure if I correctly remember all the details, but I think it read some parameters from a file and fed them to some other script. Since it had something to do with the webserver the user was administrating, they needed write access to the file, granted via ACL. That took me a while to spot, actually. Not sure why, but ACL is a constant blind spot for me. As for passing the parameters, you can just append the contents of the file to the command and pipe it to bash.

I don't recall what the normal script did, but it needed writing permissions for something. The proper way to do this would be ACL, but I guess I'm not the only one with a blind spot. The easy way to ensure the script can do whatever it needs to is to sudo the whole thing.

So what do you do if you have a script running every ten minutes, reading the first line of a file you can edit, then executing it with superuser privileges?

Whatever the fuck you want.

16

You mean we shouldn't have a 'while true; eval $file' job running as root??? Goddammit, someone help me fix my remote admin script!!!

8
Hawkereply
lemmy.world

Starts an interactive session as root (or another user when combined with -u)

11
Oisteinkreply
lemmy.world

It provides a login shell - like

su -

So you get the full environment from that user

4

sudo -i starts a login shell as the specified user. Login shell means it'll read that user's bashrc/zshrc/whatever other login files and apply those. If no user is specified, then it'll login as root, so you get a root shell

4
lemmy.world

Gives you a shell where you basically are sudo for every command.

2
B-TR3Ereply
feddit.org

OMG. There's literally more ignorance and bullshit than words in that sentence. It is so wrong that not even the opposite is true. I hope that was sarcasm - in which case I draw my hat because it would be a true peace of art.
Before voting me down, be sure to

man environ
  • and be sure you've understood at least what the environment variables do. If that is too hard for you, at least find out what the difference between a binary and a UID might be.
-2
B-TR3Ereply
feddit.org

No arguments, just downvotes... I almost suspect some participants do not even understand what might be wrong with "you are sudo"? I also bet you don't have the right idea what the difference between effective UIDs might be depending if you're using "su", "su -i" , "su - " sudo or "sudo su". The differences are not exactly subtile and I dare to say admins on unixoids who don't know them are basically talking heads without an idea what they're actually talking about.

2

I have no idea how any of this is different. Sudo does things as root. Sudo -i logs you in as root where you can do things. So if there is a difference it is v subtle.

1
discuss.online
  1. Turn on monitor.
  2. Sudo su
  3. Copying and pasting terminal commands I find off the Internet
  4. Living life to the fullest.
13
alias rm="rm -rf";
alias cd="rm ~/Desktop; cd";
pyhton="shutdown now"
13

Look at OP, claiming to have that mythical girlfriend who will make a sandwich without escalating privileges

6
sh.itjust.works

It is indeed.

For those unaware: sudo !! if your previous command failed because you forgot sudo.

17
discuss.tchncs.de

Let's say I run something like rm a.txt && rm b.txt, will sudo !! work for both commands or just the first?

8
Skullgridreply
lemmy.world

!! basically pastes the last ... action you took as an interaction with the shell. it's the same as pressing the up arrow, and putting whatever you want in the same position relative to the !!

https://youtu.be/PRm6tYo8nGY?t=64

7

I wasn't sure, so I tested this. Turns out, only a.txt would be deleted and removal of b.txt fails due to lack of permissions.

4

!! is pure textual substitution, so it'd be sudo rm a.txt && rm b.txt. You could do something like sudo sh -c "!!" though.

3

Your terminal at boot. That would be TECTONIX or VT100 when your good old VAX has made a boo-boo once more? But I wouldn't know where to fill any Chinese contact spray ("sudo su", "Fu Manchu"...) in there. Or do you by any means mean your .bashrc? You know, before sucessfully shooting your own foot you'd need how to load and unlock.

3

Unpopular opinion:
On 99% of all Linux systems, you don't need sudo.
It's not like you have hundreds of users with varying levels of access logging into your PC.
Just use root for admin tasks.

3
Alleroreply
lemmy.today

Su often takes more time and is more involved, even if it's a difference between very little effort and no effort at all.

For example, I update and install apps through CLI about once a week, and I'd rather just bang the sudo than go su, enter root credentials, and only then go for what I wanted in the first place.

2

su [Enter] [Password] [Command] doesn't take longer than sudo [Command] [Enter] [Password]
And after you've done it once, you can just keep the terminal open and do all other admin tasks without typing sudo
Open another terminal (or tab) for user stuff.

2

This wouldn't do anything. Sudo is white magick while su is the devil's work, so they cancel out each other. I know, because I've read Harry Potter, seen "War Games" and am a social net Linux expert.

1

Tell this to my cousin (though he probably does this to gaslight me).

1