How to give a Linux user sudo access?

Question

I am trying to give sudo access to one of my users. What should I type in my terminal?

Answer 1

You need run visudo and in the editor that it opens write:

igor    ALL=(ALL) ALL

That line grants all permissions to user igor.

If you want permit to run only some commands, you need to list them in the line:

igor    ALL=(ALL) /bin/kill, /bin/ps

Answer 2

This answer will do what you need, although usually you don't add specific usernames to sudoers. Instead, you have a group of sudoers and just add your user to that group when needed. This way you don't need to use visudo more than once when giving sudo permission to users.

If you're on Ubuntu, the group is most probably already set up and called admin:

$ sudo cat /etc/sudoers
#
# This file MUST be edited with the 'visudo' command as root.
#

...

# Members of the admin group may gain root privileges
%admin ALL=(ALL) ALL

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

# See sudoers(5) for more information on "#include" directives:

#includedir /etc/sudoers.d

On other distributions, like Arch and some others, it's usually called wheel and you may need to set it up: Arch Wiki

To give users in the wheel group full root privileges when they precede a command with "sudo", uncomment the following line: %wheel ALL=(ALL) ALL

Also note that on most systems visudo will read the EDITOR environment variable or default to using vi. So you can try to do EDITOR=vim visudo to use vim as the editor.

To add a user to the group you should run (as root):

# usermod -a -G groupname username

where groupname is your group (say, admin or wheel) and username is the username (say, john).

Answer 3

Edit /etc/sudoers file either manually or using the visudo application. Remember: System reads /etc/sudoers file from top to the bottom, so you could overwrite a particular setting by putting the next one below. So to be on the safe side - define your access setting at the bottom.