sudo

The sudo command is a powerful tool that offers a more controlled method of granting administrative privileges to regular users without sharing the root password. When using sudo, a user can execute commands with root-level privileges while their actions are logged, which provides an audit trail of who did what.

In contrast to su, which switches your session to the root user, sudo executes a single trailing command with elevated privileges. This allows for a more granular level of access control, as you can configure exactly which commands each user is allowed to run as root or any other user. The sudoers facility is the most common way to provide such privilege.

Using sudoers for any users or groups on the system, you can do the following:

• Assign root privilege for any command they run with sudo

• Assign root privilege for a select set of commands

• Give users root privilege without sharing the root password; users provide their own password to gain root privilege

• Allow users, if you choose, to run sudo without entering a password at all

• Track which users have run administrative commands on your system

If a user leverages su, all you know is that someone with the root password logged in. Beyond this, oversight of their activities is limited. With the sudo command, logs are created to capture which user run an administrative command, providing a more verbose account of privileged user actions

With the sudoers facility, giving full or limited root privileges to any user simply entails adding the user to the /etc/sudoers file, and defining what privilege you want that user to have. Then, the user can run any command they have been granted privileges for by preceding said command with sudo .

For example, here we see a standard user trying to view the contents of the /etc/shadow file, and then again via sudo:

Privileged Vs Un-Privileged execution