From the course: Ubuntu Linux: Essential Commands

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Manage the root account

Manage the root account

From the course: Ubuntu Linux: Essential Commands

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Manage the root account

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- [Narrator] On all Linux systems, there's a user called root that acts as the super user. That is, a user who's not constrained by any limitation. Everything is visible to root. And, unless the file's encrypted, no file is out of root's reach. Clearly it's a bad idea to always use the system as root. So there's a tool called sudo that lets us borrow root's power temporarily in order to do system administration tasks. Sudo doesn't have a strictly defined meaning, but many people, myself included, like to think of it as standing for super user do, instead of doing something as a normal user. The pronunciation varies and some people say pseudo. Not every user can use sudo. During setup, the user we created was added to a group of users called sudo, that are granted the ability to use root's authority. In general, users in groups allowed this privilege are called sudoers. And their access is listed in the /etc/sudoers file. We'll take a look at that later on. To use root's authority to…

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