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sudo conferred powers

with 3 comments

Coming from Solaris Unix and Red Hat Linux to Ubuntu, Mac OS X and other distributions of Linux was interesting a couple years ago. The fact that you couldn’t su to the root account was tedious. It didn’t take too long (a couple momentes) to recall that I could assume those privileges in a shell, like:

admin_user@machine_name:~$ sudo sh
#

Naturally, this avoids entering sudo before a series of commands and makes administering any box simpler. It should work on all distributions but I’ve not checked ALL of them because they’re too numerous anymore. I know it works on the Mac OS X, Ubuntu, and now Fedora distributions.

Today, I got a kick from the message provided by Fedora 10 when you assume root permissions. It’s been over 20 years since I got that lecture on an AT&T box at First Interstate Bank. I imagine that any equivalent box to that is in a museum, while that bank was acquired by Wells Fargo in the early 1990s. The message from Fedora is just too funny to pass on making a comment. Here’s the screen shot:

SuperUserPowers

Hope it brought a smile to some faces …

Written by maclochlainn

December 6th, 2009 at 12:59 pm

Posted in Linux,Mac,Ubuntu