Unix Third Edition: Visual Quickstart Guide

Acting Like root with sudo

As you know by now, logging in as root gives you the power to make changes across the entire Unix system, not just within the directories and files that you individually have permissions to access, read, or modify. Of course, having all this power also comes with responsibilities—not to screw up the entire system, among other possibilities. Especially as you’re learning about system administration, you may want to experiment with these skills by logging in as sudo instead. Using the sudo utility, you can run some commands as if you were root, but it’s not as risky as being root. The real root user has to give permission to use sudo, and sometimes the permission is limited to using specific utilities—you’ll have to ...