March 24, 2010
The UNIX sudo command allows the administrator to limit what commands a user may run under root (administrator) privileges on the system. The /etc/sudoers file contains entries which affect what commands are allowed to be run in this manner. Different users can be allowed to have different levels of access, and the true root, or administrator, password never has to be divulged.
Sudo will also log all of the attempted accesses of every command that it runs, thus leaving an audit trail that a suspicious administrator can check on in case an attempted system breach is suspected.
