sudo

sudo is the standard tool for gaining temporary system administrator privileges on Linux to perform administrative tasks. This eliminates the need to change the current user to root to perform these tasks.

To allow regular users to execute commands with elevated privileges, the configuration for sudo needs to be modified to allow this.

sudo supports configuration drop-in files in /etc/sudoers.d/. Using these makes it easy to modularize the configuration and remove offending files, if something goes wrong.

TIP: File names starting with . or ~ will get ignored. Use this to turn off certain configuration settings if you need to.

WARNING: Drop-in files are just as fragile as /etc/sudoers! It is therefore strongly advised to always use visudo when creating or editing sudo config files, as it will check for syntax errors. Failing to do so will risk rendering sudo inoperable!

Create a new drop-in file at:

EDITOR=nano visudo /etc/sudoers.d/01_wheel

The contents of the drop-in file are as follows:

## Allow members of group wheel to execute any command
%wheel ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL

Save and exit.

Now every user who is in the wheel user group is allowed to run any command as root.