What number of instances have you ever created a brand new consumer on a Linux machine, solely to search out out that the brand new consumer doesn’t have sudo privileges?

With out the power to make use of sudo, that consumer is proscribed in what they’ll do. This, after all, is by design, since you definitely don’t need each consumer in your system to have admin privileges. Nevertheless, customers who wish to get pleasure from admin rights should be capable to use the sudo command.

SEE: Debian vs Ubuntu: Which Linux Distro Suits Your Wants Finest? (roosho)

The right way to give customers sudo privileges

Most fashionable Linux distributions have a consumer group that grants sudo privileges just by being a member of that group. Whereas sudo configurations enable particular person accounts to have sudo privileges, this isn’t inspired as a result of it results in consumer administration complications, particularly if a consumer ID is modified or if that consumer’s account is eliminated or deactivated.

You possibly can decide which group that is by wanting on the /and so on/sudoers file. You possibly can safely view the contents of this file utilizing the command:

sudo much less /and so on/sudoers

In Fedora and Purple Hat, this group is normally the wheel group:

## Permits folks in group wheel to run all instructions
%wheel   ALL=(ALL)         ALL

In Ubuntu and Kali, this group is normally the sudo group, to not be confused with the sudo command:

# Permit members of group sudo to execute any command
%sudo    ALL=(ALL:ALL)  ALL

This implies all members of the admin group have full sudo privileges. So as to add your consumer to the admin group, you’d subject the command (as a consumer who already has full sudo privileges):

sudo usermod -a -G sudo USERNAME

The place USERNAME is the title of the consumer to be added. As soon as the consumer logs out and logs again in, they’ll now get pleasure from full sudo privileges. For those who have been utilizing Fedora or a Purple Hat-based distribution, you’d use the wheel group as a substitute:

sudo usermod -a -G wheel USERNAME

Observe that the consumer will proceed to have sudo privileges so long as that consumer has this group project. To revoke sudo privileges, you will want to take away that consumer from that group.

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Use with warning

You do not need so as to add each consumer to the sudoers file or the admin group. Use this with warning — in any other case, you threat jeopardizing system safety. However with care, you may simply handle what your customers can and can’t do.

Do extra with sudo privileges

Utilizing your newfound sudo privileges, you may add a brand new consumer to your Linux system, listing system companies, and seek for recordsdata from the command line.

As well as, you’ll wish to make administration simpler by combining a number of instructions right into a single bash immediate.

This text was initially revealed in August 2023. It was up to date by Antony Peyton in January 2025.