“As your network grows, so will your range of responsibilities.
At some stage, a system administrator may want to delegate limited
responsibilities to other users. Sudo is a special package for
this purpose. Instead of giving your root password to other users
or changing numerous programs as set uid root (to run as the root
user), you can use sudo (which stands for “superuser do”) to allow
them to run certain commands as the super user (or as another
user). Sudo allows you to strictly limit which users can
invoke it and what command they can execute.”
“All the settings for sudo have to be specified in the file
/etc/sudoers. Users enter sudo mode by issuing this command:
$sudo [command]”
“Sudo then demands a password and it checks the configuration
file (/etc/sudoers) to make sure you have “sudo” permission to run
that command on that particular machine. If the user provides the
correct password and has access to execute that command, then the
command will be executed. Otherwise, sudo logs the access attempt.
Once you are authenticated by sudo, you can use execute multiple
commands without being prompted for your password again. This
“ticket” will expire five minutes after the last time you use the
sudo command.”