sudo - command usage

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1

Hi,

I have few doubts regarding "sudo" command. It acutally allows access to other commands as a different user. It stands for "superuser do".

Now, we execute a command as

sudo su - oracle

Can you please tell me what does it do actually, thank you.

2

If you are allowed to run :

sudo su - oracle

then it runs the command

su - oracle

with root privilege, so it allow you to switch to oracle user without having to provide the password of oracle user account

3

I will add the - sign there is so it executes the .profile of the user in order to have his environment... in other words without - you would just "be" oracle from then on but without his environment ( most certainly most admin commands of a DBA would not load etc...)

4

You may want to check out your sudoers (/etc/sudoers) file. That would specify the rules for sudo on your system.

5

Thank you all, it is quite useful.

---------- Post updated at 03:09 AM ---------- Previous update was at 02:58 AM ----------

Hi,

What are all the other commands, which can be executed through 'sudo', please share more details, thank you.

6

Pretty much any command can be executed using sudo. Just depends on how it was implemented on your system.

7

sudo is configurable. /etc/sudoers determines who can execute what commands with it.