VIM, NANO, Gedit, CAT display VISUDO as garbage

xtropx · 04-18-2012, 06:48 PM

VIM, NANO, Gedit, CAT are displaying the visudo file on CentOS 6.2 as a bunch of garbage. Gedit gives me an error about UTF-8 encoding. This happens over SSH too. Tried as root (su) and regular user. What is going on here?

aus9 · 04-19-2012, 12:14 AM

Have you tried setting your locale to an UTF setting

in debian its

Code:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales

DavidMcCann · 04-19-2012, 12:39 PM

Check your locale with the "locale" command. So my output starts with
LANG=en_GB.utf8
There's a file /etc/sysconfig/i18n that sets the locale for the console: mine has
LANG="en_US.UTF-8"
which is presumably a default, and the installer only set the language for X. The only idea I have for setting the locale in X is to add an "export LANG=" to ~/.bashrc but I offer no promises. As for the difference of UTF-8 and utf8, that's a mystery to me.

TB0ne · 04-19-2012, 01:21 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by xtropx

VIM, NANO, Gedit, CAT are displaying the visudo file on CentOS 6.2 as a bunch of garbage. Gedit gives me an error about UTF-8 encoding. This happens over SSH too. Tried as root (su) and regular user. What is going on here?

Exactly what SHOULD be going on. Visudo is a binary program, not a text file. All you're going to see is 'garbage' (that is, compiled hex code). Try editing any regular text-type file.

chrism01 · 04-19-2012, 07:10 PM

Dagnabbit! I should have seen that too; looked at this qn a few times in passing and didn't click grrrr

DavidMcCann · 04-20-2012, 12:20 PM

We all jumped to the conclusion that the OP meant sudoers! It takes me back to school-days: "Answer the question you are asked, not the one you expected."

xtropx · 04-29-2012, 11:48 AM

Quote:

Exactly what SHOULD be going on. Visudo is a binary program, not a text file. All you're going to see is 'garbage' (that is, compiled hex code). Try editing any regular text-type file.

Ok, thank you. What is the proper procedure then to give a user sudo capabilities on Debian? I was under the impression you just added the user to that file, but that doesn't make much sense if you can't edit it with anything...

TB0ne · 04-30-2012, 01:18 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by xtropx

Ok, thank you. What is the proper procedure then to give a user sudo capabilities on Debian? I was under the impression you just added the user to that file, but that doesn't make much sense if you can't edit it with anything...

Very first hit for "how to give a user sudo rights in linux":
http://www.linuxhomenetworking.com/w...Users_and_Sudo

You edit the sudoers file, and for that, you have to use a specific tool, called visudo.