Do we need to reboot after adding a user to sudoers?

Question

Do we need to reboot after adding a user to /etc/sudoers?

Solution 1

No. It'll work with the next sudo command.

But if it does not work, you can avoid rebooting by running

sudo service sudo restart

Solution 2

I just did this and yes, I did in fact have to reboot. So, maybe the previous answer wasn't wrong, but it definitely isn't right 100% of the time. Writing this in case someone else is looking for the answer as I just was.

Solution 3

In CentOS 7 you can also Logout from the system with "exit" and Login again and the Sudoers will be updated.

I've tested on minimal installation but I believe it works in other targets and possibly other distributions aswell.

Solution 4

After add user to sudo group,

#su - root -c "usermod -aG sudo username;"

execute following command:

newgrp sudo

And after that you can use sudo in your commands in current session without need to restart.

Also if you are in a shell script and you want to execute command just after add user to sudoers, run following command instead:

#su - root -c "usermod -aG sudo username;"
sg sudo -c 'sudo command1; sudo command2;'

And If you don't want to reapeat sudo word in each command do as follow:

sg sudo -c "sudo -- sh -c 'command1; command2;'"

OR

sg sudo -c "sudo -- sh -c '
 command1
 command2
'"

Solution 5

In fact the only thing you need is to get a (new) login prompt, so using the following command works:

anyuser$ su -l <user>
user$ sudo <thenewlysudoedcommand>
... works...

But if you are logged in as GUI, then you need to logout & login again.

But, as with MOST linux tools you DON'T need to reboot the computer (that's a Windows thing).

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Comments

[kos]

Have you tried running sudo before rebooting?

[Ashish Karpe]

@kos have you down voted according to your comment ? if yes then you got my question wrongly.

[Nathan B]

I had to reboot as well.

[Nick Rice]

On my 14.04 system it did not work with the next sudo command. I needed to do sudo service sudo restart (Rebooting would have worked too, I guess. Bit overkill though.)

[Nick Rice]

Instead of rebooting you can do sudo service sudo restart

[Necktwi]

@NickRice any idea on what to do in Arch Linux?

[user2066480]

What if $sudo service sudo restart outputs 'Failed to restart sudo.service: Unit sudo.service is masked.'

[xeruf]

Failed to restart sudo.service: Unit sudo.service is masked.?

[Admin]

sudo is masked, which means most systemctl commands don't work with it. There is no need to restart anything after sudoedit, though, so there shouldn't be a need to restart the sudo "service." Read more here: askubuntu.com/questions/816285/…