this post was submitted on 25 Apr 2025
621 points (98.0% liked)

linuxmemes

25025 readers
1109 users here now

Hint: :q!


Sister communities:


Community rules (click to expand)

1. Follow the site-wide rules

2. Be civil
  • Understand the difference between a joke and an insult.
  • Do not harrass or attack users for any reason. This includes using blanket terms, like "every user of thing".
  • Don't get baited into back-and-forth insults. We are not animals.
  • Leave remarks of "peasantry" to the PCMR community. If you dislike an OS/service/application, attack the thing you dislike, not the individuals who use it. Some people may not have a choice.
  • Bigotry will not be tolerated.
  • 3. Post Linux-related content
  • Including Unix and BSD.
  • Non-Linux content is acceptable as long as it makes a reference to Linux. For example, the poorly made mockery of sudo in Windows.
  • No porn, no politics, no trolling or ragebaiting.
  • 4. No recent reposts
  • Everybody uses Arch btw, can't quit Vim, <loves/tolerates/hates> systemd, and wants to interject for a moment. You can stop now.
  • 5. πŸ‡¬πŸ‡§ Language/язык/Sprache
  • This is primarily an English-speaking community. πŸ‡¬πŸ‡§πŸ‡¦πŸ‡ΊπŸ‡ΊπŸ‡Έ
  • Comments written in other languages are allowed.
  • The substance of a post should be comprehensible for people who only speak English.
  • Titles and post bodies written in other languages will be allowed, but only as long as the above rule is observed.
  • 6. (NEW!) Regarding public figuresWe all have our opinions, and certain public figures can be divisive. Keep in mind that this is a community for memes and light-hearted fun, not for airing grievances or leveling accusations.
  • Keep discussions polite and free of disparagement.
  • We are never in possession of all of the facts. Defamatory comments will not be tolerated.
  • Discussions that get too heated will be locked and offending comments removed.
  • Β 

    Please report posts and comments that break these rules!


    Important: never execute code or follow advice that you don't understand or can't verify, especially here. The word of the day is credibility. This is a meme community -- even the most helpful comments might just be shitposts that can damage your system. Be aware, be smart, don't remove France.

    founded 2 years ago
    MODERATORS
    top 50 comments
    sorted by: hot top controversial new old
    [–] sanderium@lemmy.zip 109 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (5 children)
    [–] b_tr3e@feddit.org 31 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

    It's safe because it's sudo! Like sudo rm -rf /*

    [–] bitchkat@lemmy.world 11 points 3 weeks ago (5 children)

    Back in the olden days we used to nfs mount every other machines file system on every machine. I was root and ran "rm -rf /" instead of "./".

    After I realized that it was taking too long, i realized my error.

    Now for the fun part. In those days nfs passed root privileges to the remote file system. I took out 2.5 machines before I killed it.

    load more comments (5 replies)
    load more comments (2 replies)
    [–] traction 12 points 3 weeks ago
    [–] hddsx@lemmy.ca 11 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

    You won’t be able to do certain things. Either .ssh or ~ expects certain exact permissions and pukes if it’s different, IIRC

    [–] Cethin@lemmy.zip 7 points 3 weeks ago

    Yep. I fucked up once when I meant to type chmod for something but with "./" but I missed the ".". It was not good.

    [–] kayzeekayzee@lemmy.blahaj.zone 9 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

    utter nonsense of the deranged

    [–] bishbosh@lemm.ee 13 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

    It's my computer, I'll read and write what I want

    [–] hactar42@lemmy.world 58 points 3 weeks ago (6 children)

    A fellow nano user! There are dozens of us!

    [–] courval@lemmy.world 12 points 3 weeks ago

    Hell yeah gotta embrace the pain of using archaic key bindings that you'll forget until the next time you need to edit a file in the terminal, you must suffer like man. Modem and sane terminal editors are for pussies! If it doesn't load in 0.01 ms it's bloated.. Whatever you do don't install anything like micro, just keep suffering!

    [–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 9 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

    Its lighter weight than vim

    load more comments (1 replies)
    load more comments (4 replies)
    [–] bitchkat@lemmy.world 56 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

    Had an idiot "fix" a permission problem by running "sudo chmod -R 777 /"

    And that is why sudo privileges were removed for the vast majority of people.

    [–] bigbuckalex@lemmy.zip 20 points 3 weeks ago (4 children)

    Oh... That sounds like a nightmare. How do you even fix that? There's no "revert the entire filesystem's permissions to default" button that I'm aware of

    [–] rabber@lemmy.ca 23 points 3 weeks ago

    You restore the system from backup

    [–] justme@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 3 weeks ago

    If you are lucky your system is atomic or has other roll back feature. Otherwise it's reinstall time.

    I guess you could set up a fresh system, run a script that goes through each folder checking the permission and setting it on the target system.

    load more comments (2 replies)
    [–] MTK@lemmy.world 9 points 3 weeks ago

    seems reasonable to me, root is just a made up concept and the human owns the machine.

    [–] mlg@lemmy.world 7 points 3 weeks ago

    Shared this before, but someone I know did a chmod on /bin which nuked all the SUID/GUID bits which borked the system lol.

    Surpsingly easy enough to undo by getting a list of the correct perms from a working system, but hilarious nonetheless

    sudo = shut up dammit, obey!

    [–] GreenKnight23@lemmy.world 40 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

    why tho?

    If it's a file I have to modify once why would I run:

    sudo chmod 774 file.conf

    sudo chown myuser:myuser file.conf

    vi file.conf

    sudo chown root:root file.conf

    sudo chmod 644 file.conf

    instead of:

    sudo vi file.conf

    1000001464

    [–] korthrun@lemmy.sdf.org 20 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (2 children)

    Inane. Intentionally convoluted, or someone following the absolute worst tutorials without bothering to understand anything about what they're reading.

    I have questions:

    • Why are your configurations world readable?
    • Why are you setting the executable bit on a .conf file?
    • Why change the files group alongside the owner when you've just given the owner rxw and you're going to set it back?
    • If it was 644 before, why 774?
    • Why even change the mode if you're going to change the ownership?
    • Why do you want roots vimrc instead of your users
    • Why do you hate sudoedit
    • Why go out of your way to make this appear more convoluted than it actually is?

    Even jokey comments can lead to people copying bad habits if it's not clear they're jokes.

    This was a joke right? I was baited by your trolling?

    [–] GreenKnight23@lemmy.world 20 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

    I felt kinda bad doing that at first. then your absolute rage made my doubt's melt away.

    lulz

    load more comments (1 replies)
    load more comments (1 replies)
    [–] xia@lemmy.sdf.org 38 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

    Getting flashbacks of me trying to explain to a mac user why using sudo "to make it work" is why he had a growing problem of needing to use sudo... (more and more files owned by root in his home folder).

    load more comments (3 replies)
    [–] a_wild_mimic_appears@lemmy.dbzer0.com 33 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

    as a GUI pleb i just doubleclick the file, which opens kate.

    i edit the file and click save, get asked for my password

    and all is fine.

    [–] baines@lemmy.cafe 37 points 3 weeks ago

    that's way too simple, the linux gods demand more esoteric suffering

    [–] courval@lemmy.world 12 points 3 weeks ago

    How dare you use computers to do stuff the way they were invented for?

    [–] korthrun@lemmy.sdf.org 26 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

    You mean sudoedit right? Right?

    edit: While there's a little bit of attention on this I also want to beg you to stop doing sudo su - and start doing sudo -i you know who you are <3

    [–] Albbi@lemmy.ca 11 points 3 weeks ago (5 children)

    Why memorize a different command? I assume sudoedit just looks up the system's EDITOR environment variable and uses that. Is there any other benefit?

    [–] moonlight@fedia.io 11 points 3 weeks ago (5 children)

    It doesn't edit the file directly, it creates a temp file that replaces the file when saving. It means that the editor is run as the user, not as root.

    load more comments (5 replies)
    [–] morbidcactus@lemmy.ca 6 points 3 weeks ago

    From the arch wiki

    sudo -e {file}
    

    Set SUDO_EDITOR in your profile to the editor of your choice, benefit is it retains your user profile for that editor, it's also less to type. For stuff like editing sudoers you're supposed to use visudo to edit that. Others can probably give better/more thorough reasons to consider it.

    [–] korthrun@lemmy.sdf.org 6 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

    I know this is a meme community, but a modicum of effort IS warranted IMO. https://superuser.com/questions/785187/sudoedit-why-use-it-over-sudo-vi is the top result of a search for "why use sudoedit" and a pretty good answer. "man sudoedit" also explains it pretty well, as shown by another commenter.

    load more comments (1 replies)
    load more comments (2 replies)
    [–] hddsx@lemmy.ca 25 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

    Sorry, user babe is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported

    [–] x00z@lemmy.world 6 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

    All incidents are reported directly to Stallman.

    load more comments (2 replies)
    [–] Sixtyforce@sh.itjust.works 22 points 3 weeks ago (5 children)

    sudo dolphin

    Then I act like a Windows user and go there via the GUI because I didn't feel like learning how to use nano.

    [–] bishbosh@lemm.ee 7 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

    If you're running dolphin as sudo and open like a text file in an editor, does it edit the file with sudo?

    [–] tal@lemmy.today 12 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

    When you run a process under sudo, it will be running as the root user. Processes that that process launches will also be running as the root user; new processes run as the same user as their parent process.

    So internally, no, it won't result in another invocation of sudo. But those processes a dolphin process running as root starts will be running as the root user, same as if you had individually invoked them via sudo.

    load more comments (1 replies)
    load more comments (4 replies)
    [–] Shanmugha@lemmy.world 20 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (6 children)

    You meant sudo vim, ok?

    (disclaimer: joke. Let the unholy war start)

    [–] jaybone@lemmy.zip 10 points 3 weeks ago (4 children)

    Do people really war over nano vs vi?

    I get the vi vs emacs war, but are people really willing to die on a hill over nano?

    load more comments (4 replies)
    load more comments (4 replies)
    [–] capuccino@lemmy.world 18 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

    If your file is not in your home directory, you shouldn't do chmod or chown in any other file

    load more comments (2 replies)
    [–] LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 points 3 weeks ago

    :w !sudo tee %

    [–] Katzimir@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 3 weeks ago

    now i feel shame. I used to love breaking my xorg.conf in nano

    [–] jumponboard@lemmy.world 9 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

    Why does it have to be transcribed into numbers anyway?

    [–] hemko@lemmy.dbzer0.com 38 points 3 weeks ago

    Doesn't have to. You can also do something like

    chmod +rw ./filename

    [–] daggermoon@lemmy.world 7 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

    Total noob. Any experienced user knows it's

    run0 micro file.txt
    
    load more comments (1 replies)
    [–] SleepyPie@lemmy.world 6 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

    If it’s all my system should I really care about chown and chmod? Is the point that automatic processes with user names like www-data have to make edits, and need permission to do so, and that’s it?

    Newish Linux user btw

    [–] corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 9 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

    Short answer: yes.

    One of the tenets of security is that a user or process should have only enough access to do what it needs, and then no more. So your web server, your user account, to your mail server, should have exactly what they need, and usually that's been intricately planned by the distro.

    If you subvert it you could be writing files as root that www-data now can't read or write. This kind of error is sometimes obvious and sometimes very subtle.

    Especially if you're new to this different access model, tread carefully.

    Great news! If you mess it up, many distros are really great at allowing you to compare permissions and reset them. The bad news is that maybe you're not on one of those. But you could be okay.

    load more comments (1 replies)
    [–] palordrolap@fedia.io 9 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

    In addition to corsicanguppy's comment, some β€” often important β€” programs actually expect the system to be secured in a particular way and will refuse to function if things don't look right.

    Now, you'd be right to expect that closing down permissions too tightly could break a system, but people have actually broken their systems by setting permissions too openly on the wrong things as well.

    That said, for general, everyday use, those commands don't need to be used much, and there might even be a way to do what they do from your chosen GUI. Even so, it nice to know they're there and what they do for those rare occasions when they might be needed.

    load more comments (1 replies)
    [–] juipeltje@lemmy.world 6 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

    I'm not sure if that's the joke and it flew over my head but isn't editing with sudo what you should be doing anyway if it's a system level file? You shouldn't change permissions unless the file is actually supposed to be owned by your user.

    load more comments (2 replies)
    load more comments
    view more: next β€Ί