A quick guide to the `sudo` command, used to run a command as another user
sudo
is commonly used to run a command as root.
You must be enabled to use sudo
, and once you do, you can run commands as root by entering your user’s password (not the root user password).
The permissions are highly configurable, which is great especially in a multi-user server environment, and some users can be granted access to running specific commands through sudo
.
For example you can edit a system configuration file:
sudo nano /etc/hosts
which would otherwise fail to save since you don’t have the permissions for it.
You can run sudo -i
to start a shell as root:
You can use sudo
to run commands as any user. root
is the default, but use the -u
option to specify another user:
sudo -u flavio ls /Users/flavio
The
sudo
command works on Linux, macOS, WSL, and anywhere you have a UNIX environment