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HACKADAY

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June 7, 2022

INTERVIEW: INVENTING THE UNIX “SUDO” COMMAND

114 Comments
* by:
Aleksandar Bradic

May 28, 2014
*
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Title:
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Short Link:
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It was just one of these nights. We were sitting at the O’Neil’s San Mateo Pub,
taking a break after a long day at the Maker Faire. Hackaday was hosting an
informal drink-up and a steady stream of colorful characters has just started
flowing in. That’s when we met [Robert Coggeshall].

[xkcd, 149]It started off as a normal discussion – he runs Small Batch
Assembly and does a lot of interesting things in the maker space. Then he
brought up a fascinating detail – “Oh, did you know I also co-invented sudo back
in the 80’s?”

If you ever did as much as touch a Unix system, you’ll know this is a big deal.
What came as an even bigger surprise was that something like sudo had to be
“invented” in the first place. When thinking about the base Unix toolkit, there
is always this feeling that it all emerged from some primordial soup of ideas
deep inside of Bell Labs, brought to life by the infinite wisdom of [Ken
Thompson] and the rest of the gang. Turns out that wasn’t always the case. We
couldn’t miss asking [Bob] for an interview, and he told us how it all came
about…

THE HACK

The story itself is a fairly common one – it starts with a problem and ends with
a hack. [Bob] and his colleague [Cliff Spencer] were working at SUNY/Buffalo at
the time, and [Bob] was in charge of administration of their Unix
infrastructure. Since Unix was a multiuser system from the very beginnings,
being a sysadmin meant executing a lot of commands as a superuser. The standard
way of doing so was using the “su” command, which enabled user to switch to a
superuser mode. While this generally did the trick, it opened a lot of
opportunities for human error – it was just too easy to forget you’re in a
“root” mode and end up causing inadvertent damage to the system. [Bob] and
[Cliff] thought of a better way – instead of constantly switching, why not
simply create a tool that enables executing individual commands as a superuser,
without changing the actual user id in the shell. They quickly whipped up a hack
that combined two standard Posix system calls – setuid() and execvp() in order
to achieve such functionality. The command was named “sudo“, short for
superuser-do ([Bob] insists that correct pronunciation is /ˈsuːduː/, not
/ˈsuːdoʊ/).

GOING OPEN SOURCE

After proving to be an indispensable tool in the sysadmin arsenal at SUNY, sudo
slowly began to make its way into other research groups and was formally “open
sourced” in 1985. In those days Open Source was not yet all the rage (Richard
Stallman had just come out with his GNU Manifesto the same year), so the act of
“open sourcing” essentially meant posting the source code on the Usenet. And on
December 15th, 1985 that’s what they did. [Bob] helped us track down
the original message posted to the net.sources group.

THERE BE TROLLS

Another fascinating historical artifact that can be found in the
thread following the original post is an early example of the Internet Troll
species:

--
isn't this the same as saying:
su -f root -c "some commands here"

why reinvent the wheel? plus this doens't have to be recompiled when
there is a new root passwd.

i find that most unix programs get written again and again and again,
when the one you wanted was already there in the first place.

tom
--

Though it is true that sudo didn’t invent anything fundamentally new, it did
something better – it provided an efficient solution to a real problem. And
because [Bob] and [Cliff] cared enough to share it with the world, other people
happily adopted it and continued to improve. Today sudo counts 9944 lines of
code (up from 153 lines in the original release) and is maintained by [Todd C.
Miller]. Over 30 years in age, it still continues to receive code contributions
and regularly issues new releases.

*
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Posted in Featured, Interviews, Linux HacksTagged bob coggeshall, sudo

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114 THOUGHTS ON “INTERVIEW: INVENTING THE UNIX “SUDO” COMMAND”

1. demon256 says:
May 28, 2014 at 10:04 am

“[Bob] insists that correct pronunciation is /ˈsuːduː/, not /ˈsuːdoʊ/”

Seriously ? This crap again ? This is on the same level as “nerd vs geek”,
and the only people who give a toss about it don’t belong in either group.

Nitpicking about the pronunciation of a command is ridiculous.

Aside from that, an interesting interview. :)

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Reply
1. cb88 says:
May 28, 2014 at 10:15 am

I think the pronunciation is fairly obvious… anyone pronouncing it with
the same ending as Pseudo is trippin’

sudo actually makes less sense know than the 80’s since we have more
things to remind us of if the console we are interacting with is root or
not… (window titles, color consoles etc.. )

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Reply
1. David Kuder says:
May 28, 2014 at 4:37 pm

The intent isn’t just to remind you that you are performing
operations as root, but to act as a gate keeper to determine who can
do what as root. It is far easier to remove a person from the sudoers
file than to change the root password and notify 30 people of the
change. Just because Tim needs the ability to execute shutdown /
reboot commands on the financials server doesn’t mean he should have
the ability to impersonate Jill and use her credentials to change his
wages in the payroll database…

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1. Carlos W says:
May 28, 2014 at 5:28 pm

“sudo bash” and you are root for all purposes. Then you can
impersonate Jill.

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1. Paul says:
May 28, 2014 at 5:52 pm

Apparently you do not understand what sudo does and how to
properly configure it.

A properly configured sudoers file will allow you to not only
control WHO can user it, but also WHAT they can do. This is why
su and sudo are NOT the same thing anymore (maybe back in 1985
they kinda were, but that is no longer the case and has been
for some time).

You don’t simply say “these people can use sudo and can do
anything root does.”

Though you can, it’s poor practice. You can group people and
limit the commands they can run so that someone cannot simply
run “sudo bash” and poof they become full superuser.

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2. kaidenshi says:
May 28, 2014 at 7:21 pm

Or just “sudo su”, like so many command line tutorials around
the web insist on, even though it really only makes sense on
distros like Ubuntu that have the root account disabled by
default.

Report comment

3. rewolff says:
May 29, 2014 at 3:48 am

I’m replying to the replies to this, not to your post. But the
reply button on those replies is absent.

The thing is that privileged commands are usually privileged
for a reason. Once you have the permission to run one command
as root, it is usually trivial to leverage that permission to
full root access.

This is partly because the commands you’ll be having permission
for are (apparently) not setuid-root. So they are not scanned
for “the usual suspects”.

A slightly “too trivial” example that everybody will
understand: Suppose we want to allow Jill to edit
/etc/resolv.conf because she does networking stuff. So you
allow jill to run sudo vi /etc/resolv.conf. You specify the
argument to “vi” so she wont “sudo vi /etc/passwd” to change
her UID into the number 0. But once in vi /etc/resolv.conf she
can :e /etc/passwd and read/modify/write the passwd file. All
functionality builtin, no bugs required. Just published
behaviour.

Report comment

4. gabriel says:
May 30, 2014 at 11:30 am

sudo is way ahead of you. `sudo -s` or `sudo -s john`

Report comment

2. Mike Szczys says:
May 28, 2014 at 10:19 am

Watch the video interview. He mentions that he doesn’t care how *you*
say it. But he believes the way he says it is correct.

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1. demon256 says:
May 28, 2014 at 10:43 am

Of course he says that. Because he has no control over how others say
it. But bringing it up alone is idiotic.

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1. Alex says:
May 28, 2014 at 10:52 am

You seem to care about it a lot more than he does.

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2. Eirinn says:
May 28, 2014 at 12:11 pm

Since he co-invented it he pretty much gets to name it. I could
call you Daemon256isha because i think it sounds fancier, but that
doesn’t make it right does it now?

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1. GZ says:
May 28, 2014 at 2:05 pm

Don’t make fun of Dalmatian256 like that.

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2. SavannahLion says:
May 28, 2014 at 6:25 pm

I pronounce it differently, but to type it here would probably
result in a ban

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2. kaidenshi says:
May 28, 2014 at 7:26 pm

I was shocked to realize that I actually have been pronouncing it the
way the creator intended all this time. I don’t usually do that; for
example, I pronounce SATA as “ess ay tee ay” (i.e. spelled out),
instead of “SAT-ah” like most people in the tech world. “SAT-ah” just
sounds silly to my ears, much like “scuzzy” for SCSI did back in the
day.

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1. phnx says:
May 29, 2014 at 3:50 am

Oddly I say ‘scuzzy’ but am militantly against ‘saytah’ (SATA) and
‘gooey’ (GUI).

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2. cb88 says:
May 29, 2014 at 10:04 am

Don’t forget the precursor to SCSI … SASI :D … who wouldn’t want a
sassy computer bus :P

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3. Brian Benchoff says:
May 28, 2014 at 10:50 am

.gif is pronounced with a hard g, despite what the creator of the format
says.

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1. Ben says:
May 28, 2014 at 11:04 am

Apparently Larry Boucher intended SCSI to be pronounced “sexy”. That
didn’t work out either.

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1. Torque says:
May 28, 2014 at 2:32 pm

“I’m SCSI and I know it”…..

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2. JRDM says:
May 28, 2014 at 2:37 pm

I’m totally unaware of that one. I can see it, but I wonder if it
was dropped for being a bit less appropriate.

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3. Tom says:
May 28, 2014 at 3:13 pm

You’re supposed to pronounce it as an Italian apology now, right?

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1. Spork says:
May 28, 2014 at 6:32 pm

@Tom, I skull your comment.

Cool interview. Seems obvious now that you would want a sudo
command and Microsoft even tried to get on board (kinda) with
UAC. Still, it’s this type of “invention” that causes a
paradigm shift. When I learned Linux, I always set up sudoers
and use sudo rather than su.

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2. Greenaum says:
May 29, 2014 at 11:47 am

We didn’t (AFAIK) have it on the System V, Honeywell Bull mini
we had in the early 90s at college. Wyse 60 serial terminals,
oooh! So I dunno how popular it was and why our system didn’t
have it. The students spent half our time hacking the thing and
finding out interesting stuff to do, so sure we’d have seen it
under “su” in the ls -la.

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3. Greenaum says:
May 29, 2014 at 1:27 pm

Oh, I see I mentioned that the other day, pardon me. Doesn’t
take much excuse to get me going on about those terminals tho,
they were LOVELY! Stil want one to run off a serial port now.
On Ebay they’re not cheap.

Ironically you can get the “thin client” stuff Wyse (and
everyone else) made later in the 1990s / 2000s, for almost
giveaway prices. $30 or so for a “thin client” from the stupid
“let’s push thin clients on everbody (but make sure they run
Intel and Windows)” fad of a few years ago. Real, proper 8-bit
serial terminals still go for well over $100.

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4. Kristian says:
May 28, 2014 at 11:16 pm

I think Mike might have had the same idea when he made his last
name Szczys ;)

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2. Jason says:
May 28, 2014 at 11:37 am

Amen!

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3. Greenaum says:
May 28, 2014 at 1:28 pm

“G” for “graphics”. Obvious!

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2. John says:
May 28, 2014 at 10:06 am

Hmm, was hoping that this article may give me some idea of “why” but even
after 20 years of using only Linux that still evades me. Perhaps never
using it is my problem.

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1. demon256 says:
May 28, 2014 at 10:08 am

“While this generally did the trick, it opened a lot of opportunities
for human error – it was just too easy to forget you’re in a “root” mode
and end up causing inadvertent damage to the system.”

I believe that answers your question. :P

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1. John says:
May 28, 2014 at 10:11 am

Sadly no. What does more damage, configuring under root and giving no
one the password, letting users do what they need to and if they
can’t they ask you or giving them the ability to run commands that
they shoudn’t?

Sudo is installed by default on all distributions that I know so
removing it is just another thing you have to do before you can let
Billy Moron loose on the machine.

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1. John says:
May 28, 2014 at 10:14 am

I now have to spend eternity looking at lose instead of loose, I
hate not being able to edit posts. :)

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1. Mike Szczys says:
May 28, 2014 at 10:20 am

I got your back… fixed.

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2. brett says:
May 28, 2014 at 12:23 pm

I think both versions work, don’t they? :)

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3. ng says:
May 28, 2014 at 10:21 pm

@Mike

Yay!

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2. Jonathan says:
May 28, 2014 at 10:17 am

What distributions let any user run sudo by default? None that
I’ve used, excluding the first/only account created by default in
ubuntu. All subsequent users are blocked from sudo.

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1. John says:
May 28, 2014 at 10:22 am

But that one is enough if you are sticking a one user system on
a laptop for someone and I would think that is the most common
system installed by the masses. I am sure I am wrong here,
because I cannot believe so many people use it and think it is
good. I tend to believe that if you f*** up then you are to
blame and if I do something stupid as the root user then I will
accept the consequences, there is nothing quite like giving
yourself several days extra work for teaching you to be
careful. :)

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2. Greenaum says:
May 28, 2014 at 1:43 pm

I think the idea is, that an admin, which nowadays since
desktop Unix (ie Linux) has arrived, is often the sole user,
can spend most of his time in user mode. Even if you own the
machine, spending all day as root means you can make bigger
mistakes, while not giving any real advantages.

So the single user can spend all day as a user, where his
machine is protected from many mistakes he might make, or
anything that’s invaded his user account. But since he’s the
sole user he also needs to tweak and administrate things.
Instead of making him log out and back in again, for just one
or two jobs, he can use sudo. Sudo checks he’s allowed to use
it, and does whatever important system job while the guy can
still stay in his nice safe user account all day.

Unix wasn’t designed, CMIIW, to be used in root mode all day.
The root account is only for adminning the system, not normal
user-type tasks. Sudo’s just a shortcut. The sort of thing that
starts off as a shell-script and ends up growing into a system
tool.

Personally we didn’t have it on the Unix I learned on, with
Wyse green-screen terminals and all, and we didn’t miss it. If
you’ve no need for it on your system you can always delete it.
But security-wise, being able to isolate specific tasks to
root-land, is much safer than spending all day there exposing
the system to bugs and threats, running your ordinary software
as root needlessly.

Which is a problem Microsoft eventually got around to looking
at. Maybe they’ll have a go at doing it properly some version
number / year / Spanish word / version number in the future.

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3. Ast says:
May 28, 2014 at 10:19 am

That’s what the sudoers file is for. Usually only users in an
admin-group can use sudo. Regular users cannot. So if you setup a
computer for your friend Billy Moron, jsut make sure he is a
regular, unprivileged user.

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4. what says:
May 28, 2014 at 10:26 am

“billy moron” can’t run programs they shouldn’t if they don’t have
the root password. that’s the point. sudo requires you to enter
the root password to run programs with root permissions.

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1. Jerry says:
May 28, 2014 at 11:10 am

No – if you had the root password you could login as root…or su
to root.

Sudo provides the setting to allow certain users access to run
certain commands with root permissions. The password sudo asks
you for is your password, not the root password.

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2. David Carrier says:
May 28, 2014 at 12:31 pm

I never understood it either. The only time I ever use it is to do this
once on systems that don’t have a root password by default:

sudo passwd

From then on, I just use su. I cannot think of any time that I’ve wanted
to run exactly one command as root.

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1. daler says:
May 28, 2014 at 2:06 pm

sudo apt-get install pacman4console

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3. thoriumbr says:
May 28, 2014 at 1:52 pm

The problem is that you are looking at the wrong problem:
– Your problem is manage a system with only one user: you. You have the
root password, you can do anything, can blow up the system, and nobody
cares.
– His problem is how to manage a system with N users (where N > 10,
probably N > 100), and make sure that some authorized users could run a
few privileged commands, without giving the root password for all of
them. Changing the root password would need to tell the password to
every trusted user. If someone changes the password and forgets it,
everyone is locked out unless there’s a backdoor somewhere, and
backdoors are a terrible thing to plant on a system.

I am a sysadmin, and we have LOTS of users. Some of them are devs, they
create a poorly designed and poorly tested application on our servers,
and the server crawls like a crippled tortoise. This happens a lot
because they tested on an environment with only one user (the dev), and
thinks it will behave the same once a hundred thousand users connect at
the same time.

su -c asks for the root password, the master key. sudo asks for the user
password, the ordinary key, and only trusted users can run trusted
commands.

If you think sudo is useless, you are thinking just like my devs…

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3. cantido says:
May 28, 2014 at 10:34 am

>the thread following the original post is an early example of the Internet
Troll species:

Pointing out valid information has only been “trolling” since the “don’t be
rude to me or I’ll tell my dad on you” generation of cry babies have taken
over the internet.

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1. WJCarpenter says:
May 28, 2014 at 10:54 am

I agree with cantldo. It’s not trolling if you are asking a legitimate
question, which that was.

(OK, a confession. I just read the article and didn’t watch the video.
But…) The clearest benefit to me of sudo is that you don’t have to give
out a single root password to N entitled people. Each uses his/her own
password with sudo. The whole world of superuser password management
gets simplified by an order of magnitude. That obviously doesn’t matter
much for a single-user system, but it goes up an N**2 for shops with
many admins.

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1. Trui says:
May 28, 2014 at 12:30 pm

Of course, now every user that is allowed to use sudo essentially
becomes a superuser, and needs to have his personal password managed
as if it was a superuser password.

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1. JimmyNeutron111 says:
May 28, 2014 at 3:52 pm

Yes, but only because that’s how everyone should treat their own
password(s) anyway.

If, using your (implied) logic, there are varying degrees of
acceptable password management which depend on how much access an
account garners the beholder, then I would have to say *No*, as
sudoers could have varied access and would only be considered
“superusers” for the allowed commands associated with their
individual account.

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2. notmyfault2000 says:
May 28, 2014 at 5:43 pm

And if someone transfers to a department that no longer needs
superuser access, you can just remove them from the list of people
that can sudo.

Were you handing out the root password to everyone, you’d have to
update the password, tell everyone that needs to know, and either
hope the removed person doesn’t ask someone for the new password
or very publicly broadcast to everyone that so-and-so no longer
has access to the system’s superuser. And hope the person they ask
remembers they no longer have that access.

(also misclicked report comment, meant to reply)

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1. Trui says:
May 28, 2014 at 9:59 pm

If you can’t trust a person, it is very dangerous to give them
sudo access in the first place, as they can use it to create a
back door for themselves later.

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3. eldorel says:
May 28, 2014 at 11:58 pm

Sudo can be configured to give a user full root privileges, (which
is the default for the first user created in Ubuntu).

However, it is designed to allow restricted access to specific
commands.

For example, one of my devs has access to Mount as rsu, but no
other commands.

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1. Trui says:
May 29, 2014 at 4:29 am

What is ‘rsu’ ?

access to mount can be quickly elevated to complete root
access.

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2. meanie says:
May 28, 2014 at 11:28 am

Man a thousand times this. I haven’t seen a legitimate troll in years,
its usually you disagree and I don’t like it so your a troll go away.

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3. Blue Footed Booby says:
May 29, 2014 at 5:33 am

@cantido
I like that you pretend this is some kind of new development and not an
age-old problem with managing people. Like, if you can’t think of a
single historical case of some powerful individual who doomed
him/herself buy building a hug-box of yes-men then I don’t know what to
tell you.

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4. Duwogg says:
June 3, 2014 at 9:29 am

TRUE!!! Any critial comment these days gets twisted to trolling by
whiney asses these days.Your work will be judged by others should it see
the light of day, and god forbid someone might know something you don’t
and maybe a better way of doing something. But if tyou don’t word things
for a 4 year old who just lost their puppy, look out! you’ll get labled
a troll and tossed under a bridge somewhere.

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4. JRDM says:
May 28, 2014 at 10:47 am

“It’s the same as typing a longer command” <- by people that prefer to type
more, rather than less, I guess.

I suppose the most basic functionality could be done as a bash alias.

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1. cantido says:
May 28, 2014 at 10:55 am

su -c cat /dev/urandom > /dev/sda
sudo cat /dev/urandom > /dev/sda

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1. JRDM says:
May 28, 2014 at 11:10 am

Then ” -f root” as in the post isn’t necessary?

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2. steven says:
May 28, 2014 at 11:18 am

Sure, those commands don’t differ much in typing effort but they
require different passwords to make happen. If you are the main user
and root, it probably doesn’t matter one bit. I administer systems
with multiple non-privileged users and a couple of privileged ones.
It is MUCH nicer and easier to manage to use sudo and not have a
single root password passing through multiple hands. As for Billy
Moron, when I set up a system for friends or family that first,
default privileged user is set up for me (to handle sysadmin tasks
that they will INEVITABLY come to ask about). The last step in my
setup is to make a non-privileged account for the person I’m building
the system for. If they get to understand their system, I can simply
add them to /etc/sudoers later.

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3. Jerry says:
May 28, 2014 at 11:21 am

but it’s not the same – users don’t require the root password, and
they can be restricted to running only certain commands with root
priveleges, not all commands.

Furthermore the sudo logs this access and commands run – with su,
you’d only have the ‘login’ logged.

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4. David Kuder says:
May 28, 2014 at 4:46 pm

shame that neither of those will work, as the redirection takes place
in the user’s permission context, not the superuser’s. you need to
quote the redirection for it to be performed by the superuser shell.

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1. cantido says:
May 28, 2014 at 6:33 pm

That’s true. But even with the quotes they would be the same
length and that’s the point I was making. If the length of stuff
you have to type is the only reason sudo exists then it would be
pretty pointless.

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1. JRDM says:
May 28, 2014 at 8:03 pm

I’m still not convinced your point is valid, given the line
shown in the article. But hey, if you’re going to congratulate
yourself without bothering to respond to questions, there you
go.

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5. Meee says:
May 30, 2014 at 7:21 pm

Have you tried these commands? On a system with correct permissions
for /dev/sda, and as long as you’re not already in a root shell, they
will do no damage.

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5. Chris says:
May 28, 2014 at 11:01 am

su-dew… yeah… I’m going to file that under things that the creator
pronounces wrong right next to “jif”

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1. JRDM says:
May 28, 2014 at 11:26 am

Whatever your preference may be, his pronunciation is more consistent
with the meaning of the command. And it’s not a Japanese word.

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2. Eirinn says:
May 28, 2014 at 12:25 pm

He’s the creator, like it not, if you pronounce it differently it’s
pretty much wrong. Chrys.

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1. CFWhitman says:
May 28, 2014 at 2:18 pm

Well, if that’s true then there are a lot of people who say a lot of
things “wrong.”

Generally, however, any pronunciation that is adopted by a large
percentage of people that use the word ends up being considered
correct. I think by that estimation, either pronunciation would be
considered correct.

He himself states that he doesn’t care how people pronounce it. He
just says ‘SOO-doo’ himself.

Personally, I generally tend to say ‘SOO-doe’ when I’m pronouncing it
phoneticially or ‘ess-yoo-doo’ if I’m referring to its origin. It’s
easier to get people to type it correctly that way. Really, if you’re
going to say that ‘doe’ is incorrect because it’s from the word “do,”
then how is ‘soo’ correct? Like Mr. Coggeshall, though, I don’t have
a problem with whichever way people feel like saying it.

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2. Blue Footed Booby says:
May 29, 2014 at 5:41 am

No. The rules of grammar and pronunciation are descriptive rather
than prescriptive, no matter how much middle school English teachers
may protest. The creator is the final authority on how the term they
coined was *intended* to be pronounced, but how it’s actually
pronounced defines what is correct in general parlance, for better or
worse. Understanding this fact is the universal chill pill for
language nazis everywhere.

How I learned to stop worrying and love the sue-dough.

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3. John says:
May 28, 2014 at 1:40 pm

You must use a strange alphabet if “Sudo” comes next to “Jif” , the
mis-pronunciation of “Les Miserables” which everyone knows is really
pronounced “Miserable Les”should surely come between them in your
database.

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4. Greenaum says:
May 28, 2014 at 1:47 pm

It’s “su”, as in super, sounds like “sue”. Then “do”, as in “superuser,
please do this task for me”. Su-do. It’s obvious, how can anyone get it
wrong?

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1. WJCarpenter says:
May 28, 2014 at 1:48 pm

“Those who ignore history are condemned to mispronounce it.” — famous
old saying

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2. JimmyNeutron111 says:
May 28, 2014 at 3:57 pm

I think it’s “su” as in “s”uper”u”ser.

Just sayin’.

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1. Leonard says:
May 29, 2014 at 4:40 am

I think it’s “su”as in “s”et “u”id.

;)

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1. funklord says:
May 29, 2014 at 1:01 pm

I always thought it was Switch User.

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6. FellowBadger says:
May 28, 2014 at 11:22 am

The comment that you claim is a troll is actually responding to the
previous programs posted on the thread, e.g. asroot (“recompiled when
there is a new root passwd”.) Tom Christiansen probably would have
recognized the value of sudo over su -f root since sudo doesn’t require
root password.

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7. Tod E. Kurt (@todbot) says:
May 28, 2014 at 11:23 am

Awesome article. Love seeing Unix history. Since it’s in our phones and
TVs, it’s very relevant. And sudo rules.

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8. vonskippy says:
May 28, 2014 at 11:38 am

Somehow Unix Greybeards managed for decades not to f**k up their systems
using root, then Unoobtu comes along and tells everyone users are too
stupid to be trusted.

Sudo this sudo that sudo everything is about as useful (and ten times as
annoying) as all the UAC popups in Windows Vista.

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1. John says:
May 28, 2014 at 1:07 pm

I feel I have to add also that the “if it aint broke don’t fix it” has
also disappeared from Linux now and updates seem to add more broken bits
and bloat rather than just being about mending stuff. Where do I go next
once I get totally peed off with it, that is the hard one to solve. The
latest one to annoy me was the Chrome update a few days ago, the mouse
now lets go of the side scroll bars if you move too far from the window,
that is so irritating. :) Still has a long way to go before it stops
being the most usable OS in the world though. :)

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1. Jerry says:
May 28, 2014 at 10:12 pm

Technically a Chrome update has nothing to do with Linux…you’re being
annoyed up the wrong tree.

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2. ng says:
May 28, 2014 at 10:27 pm

Of course for those decades being a Unix Admin meant only being a Unix
Admin. Now it means software development, project management,
virtualization, clustering, sans, networks, hardening, tunneling, dba,
accounting, salesman, and so much more.

Long past are the days of the lone admin in the basement of some huge
building typing away on a model m connected directly to a machine.

Information tech has grown up. Part of that means accepting that
everyone makes mistakes.

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9. Michel says:
May 28, 2014 at 11:45 am

Interesting, because in the “old” Unix world (around 1980-1990), there was
a command (if I remember correctly, it was an obscure hack picked somewhere
that we compiled on our system) doing approximately the same thing, called
“…” therefore hidden to a normal “ls” command : it was the time of security
by obscurity :)

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10. Will Lyon says:
May 28, 2014 at 11:59 am

NOT A HACK!

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1. static says:
May 28, 2014 at 12:50 pm

sure it’s a hack he and his partner in crime hacked the available set of
commands for an operating system, and sounds like the command itself was
subject to hacking.

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11. David Anderson says:
May 28, 2014 at 1:10 pm

SUNY Buffalo is the University at Buffalo (www.buffalo.edu). Buffalo State
College is a different place. Bob is talking about the University at
Buffalo.

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12. sudo make me a sandwich says:
May 28, 2014 at 1:19 pm

The comment about tom being a Troll is very unfair. He was referring to the
force.c program posted in the same thread which requires the encrypted root
password be compiled into the program. tom’s comment is completely
legitimate in that context.

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13. Sven says:
May 28, 2014 at 1:26 pm

Am i the only one who tried mousing over the XKCD picture to read the alt
text?

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14. pcf11 says:
May 28, 2014 at 1:49 pm

That’s nice. Did I ever say that Dennis Ritchie grew up in my home town?
Because he did. He moved a few miles away but I’d still see him around from
time, to time. Now there’s someone famous in the computing world.

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15. static says:
May 28, 2014 at 2:12 pm

In light no one does and most likely can’t know everything there is to know
about everything, I’m going to call BS on the notion than pronunciation
isn’t important. I grew up in a community where anyone 10 years older than
I spoke one of several dialects of German as a second language. That
colored their English so much often I was left to figure out WTF they where
talking about. I once visited an relative that had a car being repaired by
body shop of “Mexicans” for whom English was their second language. The
body man was telling my relative he he still had to “black it”, that’s what
in sound like to me. As he continue to say that as he continued to speak
with my relative, it was clear he meant he needed block sand the work.
where a user password becomes a pseudo root password I can see where some
came to that pronunciation. In my opinion history is important, so
Coggeshall, while it’s beyond his control should have the last word.

The audio of Bob’s voice was up and down as it played here. Perhaps it was
due to inconsistent mic placement, but where I was listening while doing
email I wouldn’t noticed. In the age of digital audio surely there’s a way
to eliminate the wind noise somehow

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1. Galane says:
May 28, 2014 at 2:47 pm

Some people in the southeastern USA pronounce door like dough. But how
to they pronounce “dough”?

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1. JimmyNeutron111 says:
May 28, 2014 at 4:06 pm

Well, based on my experience, it would be pronounced (and sometimes,
spelled) the same way. Best ever was an office e-mail which named
someone as a “pillow of the community”.

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2. Greenaum says:
May 30, 2014 at 12:47 pm

“10 years older than ME”, not “I”. One of the more annoying
over-corrections. Almost as bad as calling the eighth letter of the
alphabet “haitch”. I’ve been known to break people’s spines for doing
that.

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1. Brian Benchoff says:
May 30, 2014 at 1:01 pm

Can we calm down on correcting grammar here? It’s one thing if it’s
for the posts, but now your doing the comments. I mean, dam, people.

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1. steamcheng says:
June 3, 2014 at 9:59 am

It would be one thing if he were correct, but he is wrong. the
original post was correct, “…older than I.”

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3. white crane says:
June 1, 2014 at 6:36 pm

pseudo is pronounced “sedo” or “say-doe” in places that sudo is
pronounced sue-doe. It’s only “sue due” if a space separates the su do.
Same for SCSI being scuzzy and not sexy which would be SXSI or the
spanish variant SXCI (not really serious of course).

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1. JRDM says:
June 1, 2014 at 6:41 pm

I’m not seeing any of that. For example: “pseudo |ˈso͞odō|”

Your suggested pronunciation for sudo doesn’t make sense as it’s not
a Japanese word, so it shouldn’t be pronounced like judo.

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1. JRDM says:
June 1, 2014 at 6:48 pm

Oops, your comments on SCSI, yeah, I agree.

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16. GZ says:
May 28, 2014 at 2:20 pm

Like it or not, language is a collective understanding. Words and born and
die. Meanings shift over time. A creator of thing only has limited control
over it and generally only for a short while.

The words as we use them today will evolve and no matter how much you
battle, if the population insists on using “Literal” for “Figurative” can
you even hope to address “sudo?”

I just felt the need to axs that.

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1. GZ says:
May 28, 2014 at 2:21 pm

“Words are born” .. sigh. I’m sure there are others.

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17. brynet says:
May 28, 2014 at 2:44 pm

A lot of people don’t realize this, but Sudo is developed by an OpenBSD
developer, Todd C. Miller, who is also credited for creating the
strlcpy/strlcat API that is widely used today (*BSD, Apple, Android, Linux
kernel).

http://www.courtesan.com/todd/papers/strlcpy.html

Michael W Lucas has written a book on Sudo that is a good read, he also
recently presented at BSDCan 2014′ on Sudo.

https://www.michaelwlucas.com/nonfiction/sudo-mastery
http://www.bsdcan.org/2014/schedule/events/456.en.html

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18. Galane says:
May 28, 2014 at 2:45 pm

Linus Torvalds pronounces Linux “Leenux” and his first name “Leenus” but
apparently nobody else does.

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1. WJCarpenter says:
May 28, 2014 at 3:43 pm

You are slightly mis-informed:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IfHm6R5le0

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1. JimmyNeutron111 says:
May 28, 2014 at 4:11 pm

Thanks for the link. I’ve read a lot about him, but never actually
seen him or heard him speak. Just from that little bit (and what I’ve
read), I think I like him. :)

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1. John says:
May 29, 2014 at 12:49 am

He is a God.

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19. OneShot Willie says:
May 28, 2014 at 3:50 pm

It’s so nice to read a “You’re doing it wrong!” fest, but really, in the
end as long as who ever you’re around understands you, you should probably
refer to the “when in rome” rule.

And, as for southerners, the rule is to put an “H” phonetically after the
first vowel. So,
Martha becomes Mahtha, etc. As such, the phrase “yew aint from around hair,
is ye?” isn’t talking about a tree known for it’s strength and resilience.

So, it’s common to be able to tell what someone is saying by context
(unless they’re scottish – no one can understand them even other scots!) ;
)

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1. JimmyNeutron111 says:
May 28, 2014 at 4:19 pm

ROFL! Anyone else remember Ozzy saying, “rayeeo-own”, over and over to
the TV remote?

He also said something along the lines of, “Peepel say I talkis way
‘cauza alla drugsz, but I’m just Sco-ish, it’sow weall talk.”

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1. Greenaum says:
May 30, 2014 at 1:04 pm

Presuming you mean THE Ozzy (and how many Ozzys are there?), he’s not
Scottish. Most other people who talk like that have had at least a
couple of strokes.

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20. Scott Moore says:
May 28, 2014 at 5:33 pm

9944 lines of code? Yikes! How complicated can it be to check for the
privilege and then pipe the given command as root? I suppose a gander at
the source is in order.

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1. Spork says:
May 28, 2014 at 7:20 pm

Apparently it takes quite a few lines of code to do that effectively!
Link for reference:
http://www.sudo.ws/repos/sudo

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21. Xoop says:
May 28, 2014 at 9:03 pm

sudo was created by people who don’t understand security.
No, it’s not exactly an accepted unix idiom. And in it’s default form, it’s
generally only used by newbies.

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22. kamathln says:
May 28, 2014 at 11:23 pm

You simply don’t put the words “open source” and “Richard Stallman” in the
same sentence. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Open

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23. John says:
May 29, 2014 at 1:03 am

OK, I’m persuaded. The problem now moves to the distros. I think that if
you are a big user / installer of Linux with multi-user systems then you
had better know what you are doing. The same is not true for those of us
that prefer Linux and would like more people to make daily use of it. We
want to persuade people that it is easy to install and use, is stable and
gives no problems.

It would help the not too experienced people if sudo was not there by
default and root password was set at install or a compulsory root access
account was set up as well as a user account that didn’t have sudo.

As it is now you can’t just stick a CD in and install without opening a
command window and typing things, this puts so many people off.

The way it is now you either:
Install from CD, set root password, delete sudo
or, more correctly:
Install from CD, add a new user, edit sudoers to restrict the user using
sudo and the first account to do it.

The first option is a lot quicker and easier, it is safe and secure. In
order to force people to do it “properly” the distros need changing on
their default installation. This change will not affect the multiuser
admins.

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24. Bob Coggeshall (@BobCoggeshall) says:
May 29, 2014 at 5:16 am

Hey everyone. Really enjoyed reading the comments, so far. Many, many
people have contributed to sudo over the years. I am proud to have played
the small initial role that I did. Cheers. ..c

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25. Ren says:
May 29, 2014 at 9:23 am

Wow, xkcd right in the article! Another HaD pre-emptive strike!

sudo Hackaday
Ren Tescher wins the Hackaday Prize!

(darn! it didn’t work!)

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