Donβt need sudo if youβre always root.
Now excuse me. I need to call the bank and find out why my checking account is suddenly $0.
this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2026
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Yeah I only use sudo once, for the su.
β¦ but why? βsudo -iβ is a thing. Why get another program involved?
Some people just want to watch the world burn.
Some people think before they type. They also do not think mindlessly typing "sudo" before every fucking line in bash is a valid substitute for knowing what they do. Many of them have been doing so for decades on HPUX, Solaris, BSDs and IRIX on their own and other people's/companies machines, not just on their single bedroom machine.
I don't think many people know about this feature
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(7 replies)
Straight to jail.
I've seen that piece, mostly in beginner instructions, for a root shell. But does it even make sense? Why run a elevated su? Just run su.
I think some distros don't expose or create a root password and make you do sudo su. I might be wrong.
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If I'm using the CLI, it tends to be for things that require root access. Can't properly skull fucm my system without root
You're right, just add Sudo -s to /etc/profile
Shut the front door!
In a lot of situations it's actually bad to use sudo because it can impact settings that make programs or file ownership go to root instead of the user.
How else will the OS know I'm serious ?
"Yes, Do as I say!"
But rm -fr / * seems not to work for removing the French language pack. Can someone confirm if it works with sudo?
Works fine with sudo, removes all the French bloat.
I see French bloated my system to the fullest!
Glad you fixed it. Don't forget to reboot.
Ah, I see your problem, you need to add --no-preserve-root.
See the French are super into wine - and grape vines are notoriously hard to get rid of, so if you want to really get rid of the French language pack, you need to rip that grapevine out by the root (e.g. don't preserve the root). Otherwise, the French language pack will just grow back harder and Frenchier than before.
Sacrebleu!
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IMO the "year of the Linux desktop" will come when distros are designed for people who shouldn't even be allowed to use sudo.
Let me introduce you to atomic distros.
I moved my father on Bluefin 1.5 years ago from his antique MacBook Air. He doesn't know sudo exists. He has never heard of ujust. He doesn't even command line. He hasn't had to do a single update because it all happens in the background. He just.. uses it.
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Oh, you mean better use doas everywhere? Got it.
I once did a HackTheBox where the privilege escalation weakness was a cronjob running a script. I'm not sure if I correctly remember all the details, but I think it read some parameters from a file and fed them to some other script. Since it had something to do with the webserver the user was administrating, they needed write access to the file, granted via ACL. That took me a while to spot, actually. Not sure why, but ACL is a constant blind spot for me. As for passing the parameters, you can just append the contents of the file to the command and pipe it to bash.
I don't recall what the normal script did, but it needed writing permissions for something. The proper way to do this would be ACL, but I guess I'm not the only one with a blind spot. The easy way to ensure the script can do whatever it needs to is to sudo the whole thing.
So what do you do if you have a script running every ten minutes, reading the first line of a file you can edit, then executing it with superuser privileges?
Whatever the fuck you want.
You mean we shouldn't have a 'while true; eval $file' job running as root??? Goddammit, someone help me fix my remote admin script!!!
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Look at OP, claiming to have that mythical girlfriend who will make a sandwich without escalating privileges
sudo wine
root@box ~# sudo fdisk -l
sudo man sudo
Sudo !!
πππ perfection
I came here to look for this.
So for all that time one could do THIS?
I mean, yeah, it's your computer. Just login on the root account, nothing bad ever comes of that, not even once, nope.
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(1 replies)
Sudo -ku
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