On Mac, how do I give myself permanent sudo privleges?

Question

In Mac OS X 10.6, how do I give myself permanent sudo privleges? is it like linux, in the "/etc/sudoers" file?

Solution 1

Not exactly experienced in OSX, but it seems to be located in either one of the following:

• /etc/sudoers
• /private/etc/sudoers

It is recommended that you use visudo to edit the file but you can use another text editor.

Under the line that says root ALL=(ALL) ALL

You add the name of the user and user ALL=(ALL) ALLto give yourself permanent sudo privileges.

Solution 2

You can, of course, edit /etc/sudoers manually to accomplish this.

But Mac OS X's System Preferences has a method built-in to achieve the same thing: Give the user an Administrator account, instead of a Standard account, and it will be added to /etc/sudoers as sudoer automatically (via the wheel group membership).

Users will still need to enter their own password though, which is a good thing ^(tm).

Solution 3

sudo in OSX is exactly like that under Linux, and like Linux man sudo shows the details

sudo determines who is an authorized user by consulting the file /private/etc//sudoers.

/etc is a symbolic link to /private/etc so your suggestion of /etc/sudoers will work.

Solution 4

You could as well run sudo -s

This will give you root permissions for that session.

To return to normal permissions, just type exit

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Comments

[Jerome Lecoq]

You know that sudo is there for a reason, right? The idea is to give access to superuser privileges without being constantly logged in as root (not a good idea).

[HikeMike]

ls -ld /etc results in lrwxr-xr-x@ 1 root wheel 11 30 Jun 2010 /etc -> private/etc, so they're both the same file.

[FALL3N]

Yeah, I've done that in fedora, but I wanted to ask before I did it, so I didn't break anything.. thanks

[FALL3N]

yea, I did it in fedora a while ago.. It seems to be the same process, but thanks.. didn't wanna just go haphazardly changing important system file :D

[Ani]

Wait, aren't there other special privelages that come with giving a user an "Administrator" account other than just that it adds them to the sudoers file?

[HikeMike]

@cmcculloh It's not adding the account to the sudoers file, but membership in the wheel and admin groups, complete with e.g. write permissions to /Applications and comparable other global folders. Just compare the output of e.g. id in Terminal of normal and admin users.

[Keith John Hutchison]

I discovered you need to enable root access in MacOSX 10.8. support.apple.com/en-us/HT204012

[pmagunia]

On OSX at least, you execute just sudo visudo to edit the sudoers file (don't specify the file.)

[ericmjl]

This answer is pretty awesome. There's definite use cases for having sudo access for just a session.