Subtitles of the Movie

The Root User and Associated Privileges. Of course, if you want to run administrative commands you could just login as the root user, but many Linux administrators, because of the risks, avoid that at all costs. One option to logging in as the root user is the su command. By itself, if you know the root administrative password, it logs you in from a regular account into the root account. You could then run the su space -space root command for the root PATH and associated environment variables as well but you'd still have to log out as the root user. Alternatively, you could take root privileges for just one command with the su -c command with a quote around the command that you want to run that would take root privileges for just that command. But that still requires entry of the root user password and that can be risky if you're administering a system over a network. A root password, whenever it's sent over a network, even if the connection is encrypted, that's a risk so an alternative is to set up administrative privileges for regular users in the etc/ sudoers configuration file. Full administrative privileges are normally configured for the first regular user on Ubuntu systems. I've set up a similar effect on my CentOS system as shown here. If I activate this particular line I could login to my own account and then preface any administrative commands with the sudo command. At that point I would be prompted to confirm with my regular user password, less risky than the root user password. Better yet, you can set up limited administrative sudo privileges in this file. One thing I just missed, if you want to edit the etc/sudoers file you'd have to do it with the visudo command, or if you ran the vi etc/sudoers command, that opens up that file in Read-only mode, so let's go back to the vi sudo command and look at the rest of the file. As you could see here, privileges could be set by username or even by group, so these two examples with respect to the users group as defined in the etc/group configuration file, allows all users to run these commands as if they were the root administrative user. Well, that's the basic information on how you can assign administrative privileges for other users. Thank you and on to the next video.