1 00:00:06,559 --> 00:00:08,460 In this lesson, you'll learn how to work with sudo. 2 00:00:09,220 --> 00:00:13,644 Why do we need sudo? It's all about using administrative privileges on 3 00:00:13,644 --> 00:00:18,070 Linux. By default, you always have a user with the name root. 4 00:00:19,010 --> 00:00:22,710 This user is really unrestricted. Permissions don't apply for the user 5 00:00:22,710 --> 00:00:26,410 root, and for that reason you should avoid working as root. 6 00:00:27,800 --> 00:00:33,060 Sudo allows authorized users to run tasks with escalated privileges. 7 00:00:34,259 --> 00:00:40,200 And to use it, you use sudo followed by the command that you want to use, like sudo LS root. 8 00:00:42,939 --> 00:00:47,024 Not everybody can use sudo to allow sudo usage. Users must be 9 00:00:47,024 --> 00:00:51,109 a member of the sudo group, and different sudo groups exist. 10 00:00:51,609 --> 00:00:56,219 On Red Hat, the name of that group is wheel, and on Ubuntu, the name of that group is sudo. 11 00:00:57,289 --> 00:01:02,049 Sudo configurations can be created to allow users to perform specific tasks only. 12 00:01:02,710 --> 00:01:08,819 That's something we won't cover here, but let me show you how to use sudo as an administrative user. 13 00:01:09,540 --> 00:01:13,120 Okay, so I'm going to start this demo by typing who am I? 14 00:01:13,640 --> 00:01:17,849 Who am I? Showing your current username and my current username is student. 15 00:01:18,950 --> 00:01:24,594 I'm also typing the ID command because the ID command is showing a list of groups that the 16 00:01:24,594 --> 00:01:30,239 user is a member of, and that reveals that user student is a member of the group wheel. 17 00:01:30,980 --> 00:01:32,340 And that's all that I needed to know. 18 00:01:32,879 --> 00:01:37,980 So let's do a quick test. Let me use LS l root. 19 00:01:38,579 --> 00:01:43,170 This is trying to show a long listing of else in the directory root. 20 00:01:43,810 --> 00:01:47,230 The directory root happens to be the user root home directory. 21 00:01:47,969 --> 00:01:51,469 And as an ordinary user, you don't get access to that directory. 22 00:01:52,579 --> 00:01:57,000 But if I'm repeating my previous command and I'm putting 23 00:01:57,000 --> 00:02:01,420 sudo in front of the command, look at what's happening. 24 00:02:02,680 --> 00:02:08,009 It is prompting for the password for user student. I'm entering my password and there we can see all 25 00:02:08,009 --> 00:02:13,339 the files. Well, it's just one, but still all the files in the home directory of user root. 26 00:02:14,150 --> 00:02:19,430 So when you put sudo in front of a command, then you run it with super user privileges. 27 00:02:19,430 --> 00:02:24,710 But the important thing to realize is that this only works if you are authorized to use sudo.