Don't try this at home

[Habtom]

Sudo

[xkcd.com...]

[mack]

:-)

[lucy24]

Never did know whether those syllables were phonetically designed to strike terror into the heart, or do they just stand for something?

[phranque]

su do = do as su (a super user)



that would be the classical sense.
more generally, it means "do" this as someone else.

[DrDoc]

sudo

also implies accessing the "powers" and rights of a user other than self, typically one with more power and rights ...

Sometimes a command will be rejected by the system. Say I want to create a subfolder in a folder where I only have read access. The command will fail. Issuing the same command, preceded by

sudo

, will be successful, since

sudo

will invoke the powers of the

root

user ...

The latter is what they are referring to here. Command did not work, so invoke

sudo

.

[lucy24]

Fer hevvins sakes, boys, I know what it does, I just didn't know what-if-anything it means :-P It's what you're supposed to type into Terminal to make it obey, only I've never had to. Don't know whether it's blind luck* or because the only named account on my computer is me (the administrator).


* It is not every day that I put the words "luck" and "Terminal" into the same paragraph.

[DrDoc]

On servers I manage, the administrative account basically has no rights whatsoever. It has a home folder, and it belongs to the same group as Apache, but otherwise has no rights or access to anything. And that's how it should be. Administrator != full access.

[phranque]

what-if-anything it means

it means super user do this for me

[lucy24]

Administrator != full access.

Huh. In your lexicon, what does equal full access?

There's one forum where I have "Administrator" after my name-- and I know very well it doesn't mean anything. It's just because the head honchesa got tired of looking for where they'd hidden such-and-such moderatorial feature after the last major upgrade, and did the php/bb equivalent of throwing me the keys and saying "I dunno, you look for it". But on my own computer, I don't think there's anything higher than Administrator. And that's the only context I've ever met sudo.

it means super user do this for me

In my mind it will always rhyme with "judo". Not to be confused with the Duke of URL, which I also have no interest in pronouncing correctly. Except that it sounds far more sinister.

Something about that "super user do" wording puts me forcibly in mind of the recent daily-wtf entry involving "such-and-such be that".

[graeme_p]

I assume DrDoc that means administrator has no special access without typing sudo - i.e. admin is an ordinary use with sudo. Is that not the same as your Mac?

Its the default in Ubuntu but most linux distros have a separate root account with has full access without sudo - so once you are logged in as root, you do not need sudo.

[lexipixel]

I wondered if this one was true:

[xkcd.com...]

I guess a lot of other people did too...

[reddit.com...]

(among other web site's discussions about the comic)

[lucy24]

You've already memorized it.

That's easy for him to say :(

How come people who crack passwords in the movies never have to start by figuring out the person's username?

[graeme_p]

The number for the four random common words seems reasonable if you assume about 2,000 common words - much smaller than the average person's vocabulary.

The other one seems reasonable, but it depends on what substitutions and prefixes and suffixes you allow. As he says, add a few bits for other common formats.