visudo

rblampain · 05-02-2011, 11:05 AM

I need to add a user to the sudoers in my vps host and edit a couple of files and I just cannot make sense of visudo, vi or nano. The tutorials I find on the net just take too long to study and they are never complete, can someone explain what I need to do?

I am running Debian 506.

Thank you for your help.

repo · 05-02-2011, 11:12 AM

Quote:

and edit a couple of files

Which files?
http://www.gratisoft.us/sudo/man/1.7.5/visudo.man.html
Should explain visudo.

Kind regards

droyden · 05-02-2011, 11:15 AM

What sudo permissions do you want to grant the users?

MTK358 · 05-02-2011, 03:04 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by rblampain

I need to add a user to the sudoers in my vps host and edit a couple of files and I just cannot make sense of visudo, vi or nano. The tutorials I find on the net just take too long to study and they are never complete, can someone explain what I need to do?

I don't understand your question. Are you confused about how tio use vi or nano, or abotu the sudoers file syntax?

Note that visudo is not an editor, what it does is it launches the editor in the EDITOR environment variable (or vi, if $EDITOR doesn't exist), lets you edit the file, and then when you exit the editor it makes sure the syntax is valid before saving it.

evo2 · 05-02-2011, 05:02 PM

By using visudo you can be sure that the file will be locked correctly when you are editing it and it will check for basic syntax errors.

You can change what editor is actually used (it seems it is using nano for you) by setting the EDITOR environment variable. For example if you wanted to use gedit (this should not be taken as a endorsement of this editor) you could do the following:

Code:

EDITOR=gedit visudo

HTH,

Evo2.

craigevil · 05-02-2011, 05:30 PM

Nano editor tutorials - http://www.debianadmin.com/nano-editor-tutorials.html

Nano manpage
http://www.debianadmin.com/manpages/nanomanpage.txt

visudo(8): edit sudoers file - Linux man page - http://linux.die.net/man/8/visudo

Allowing Limited Sudo Access With Visudo | Ubuntu Tutorials - http://ubuntu-tutorials.com/2007/03/...s-with-visudo/

How to configure Sudo to run programs as a different user - NewbieDOC - http://newbiedoc.berlios.de/wiki/How...different_user

rblampain · 05-03-2011, 03:26 AM

Thank you all, I needed to add the main user to the sudoer file with full permissions and edit a few configuration files on the vps. I found just enough info to insert/edit and save the files which is all I needed. There is no point trying to remember what I've learned because, not using it every day, I will have forgotten by the time I use vim again on the VPS host (my local machine uses nano).

evo2 · 05-03-2011, 04:44 AM

Glad you solved your problem. Have you considered keeping notes, so that next time you can refer back to them and save yourself some time?

Cheers,

Evo2.

---------- Post added 2011-05-03 at 18:44 ----------

Glad you solved your problem. Have you considered keeping notes, so that next time you can refer back to them and save yourself some time?

Cheers,

Evo2.

TobiSGD · 05-03-2011, 05:31 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by rblampain

Thank you all, I needed to add the main user to the sudoer file with full permissions and edit a few configuration files on the vps. I found just enough info to insert/edit and save the files which is all I needed. There is no point trying to remember what I've learned because, not using it every day, I will have forgotten by the time I use vim again on the VPS host (my local machine uses nano).

Just put the line

Code:

export EDITOR="nano"

into the file /etc/profile, this will make nano the default text editor in your system, so that visudo will use that instead of vi.