can I edit sudoers without vi?

newbiesforever · 08-09-2009, 03:42 PM

I need to add myself to the sudoers file, but don't know how to use vi yet (the file says it must be edited in vi as root). Until I learn, is there another way?

the trooper · 08-09-2009, 03:51 PM

How about trying kate for Kde or gedit for Gnome?.
I believe both use a gui.

XavierP · 08-09-2009, 03:58 PM

Yes you can. Man visudo gives, the second paragraph):

Quote:

There is a hard-coded list of editors that visudo will use set at compile-time that may be overridden via the editor sudoers Default variable. This list defaults to the path to vi(1) on your system, as determined by the configure script. Normally, visudo does not honor the VISUAL or EDITOR environment variables unless they contain an editor in the aforementioned editors list. However, if visudo is configured with the --with-enveditor option or the env_editor Default variable is set in sudoers, visudo will use any the editor defines by VISUAL or EDITOR. Note that this can be a security hole since it allows the user to execute any program they wish simply by setting VISUAL or EDITOR.

Try this command as your user and as root:

Code:

EDITOR=/path/to/nano visudo

PTrenholme · 08-09-2009, 06:19 PM

I've always added myself to the sudoers file with a kdesu kate /etc/sudoers command on Fedora. As far as I can tell, Fedora will let you use any editor you want to use, but -- as noted by XavierP -- that may be distribution specific.

Note that, on some distributions (e.g., *ununtu ones), the system installer is automatically added to the sudoers file.

w1k0 · 08-10-2009, 01:35 PM

You can open /etc/sudoers file using any text editor. Unfortunately in such case visudo doesn't report possible errors.

I discussed sudo usage for a few times. Here's nice explanation of it: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ml#post3623333.