How often have you typed in a command in your linux shell, and then realized that you forgot to type sudo, so you end up with an error or editing the dreaded read-only file? This happens to me much more than I’d like to admit, so I’m writing about it.
I recently found a fun feature available within the sudo program that will insult you when you do the wrong thing such as enter your password incorrectly. I’ll tell you how you can activate the feature for a few laughs and also give a few examples of what insults you might get.
I’ve been answering a lot of support threads lately wherein users have said they are unable to empty the trash can because a file in there is owned by root or they cannot get a Firefox setting change to stick (and it turns out their Firefox settings folder is owned by root).
Do you know where this comes from, why this is happening?
Bad advice. It all comes from bad advice.
The follow hopes to counter that.
I decided to write this as a subsection of Root, Superuser, and User Management Basics as that was getting rather lengthy. There is a bit more to understand about managing users, groups, and super-user permissions. We’ve already covered how to add a user, delete a user, add a group, delete a group, rename a group, and how to reset a user’s password. Now what we didn’t go into depth was, all of this information is controlled by a number of files and these commands modify these files. These files can be manually editted though to accomplish the same thing or for more detailed management.
This will cover the basics of user and group management as well as touch on the abilities of super users.