Open root terminal without switching user (OS X)

Question

I'm not in sudoers:

..... is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.

How can I sudo in this terminal window, without switching user?

The well-known command sudo -u administrator -i also gives the above message.

Solution

Say your admin account name is admin, then:

su admin

Then you are the admin user...

.....

And Gordon Davisson has a good suggestion. When you're a user with admin rights, you can use sudo to get root rights even if there is no root user. And you can use "sudo john" to become user John without knowing his password.

Comments

[Mike Heinz]

Not helpful. He wants to be root, but root doesn't permit 'su' on OSX.

[Dmitry Isaev]

It's exactly what I need! No need to change the current user policy (unlike the below answer). Thanks to rxt.

[Gordon Davisson]

@MikeHeinz: he can use su to switch from a standard user to the admin account, and then sudo to switch from admin to root.

[Dmitry Isaev]

I've already said about "no change to the current user policy", so @rxt's answer is enough.

[heiglandreas]

actually it's not a change to the user policy as the user is still not an admin user. It only allows usage of the sudo command for the given user. But when you are satisfied, thats OK.