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Set Up Sudo: Escalate Privilege Without Using SU

I've been using Arch Linux now for more than a year and all that time I have not set up sudo. Sudo is a better way to perform root jobs without logging in to your root account. Among many benefits of sudo is that once you're finished with your business it drops the privileges back to normal. You can also specify which users can perform what actions.

Download the sudo program.
$pacman -S sudo

The configuration file for sudo is the /etc/sudoers

Warning: always use visudo to edit /etc/sudoers.

Which means don't open /etc/sudoers with an editor? not really. You can set visudo to use your favorite editor. For example vim, nano, gedit.

#to set visudo to use nano and open a default sudoers file
$ EDITOR=nano visudo

#add a user (you perhaps) to do root activity
USER_name ALL=(ALL) ALL

Read about all the options available for sudo in this Arch wiki.
Read the sudo manual.


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