Category: system admin

I discovered that there are many different ways to run a program as root.

The most well known way is to use the sudo command

$> sudo run_as_root_program.sh

This, of course, prompts for the password which you need to then enter.

But what if we need to run the program itself from another program so that the password prompt doesn’t appear?

I came across this requirement recently and it took quite a few iterations before I got it right.

For whatever reason, the default editor to change sudo permissions, which pops up when visudo is entered, is set to nano. I don’t have a clue why an option can’t be given on first use to change the editor.

The way to change it is to run the update-alternatives command

$> sudo update-alternatives --config editor

Which gives us these options.

Select 3 for vim.basic and we’re back to sanity.

When I’m setting up a linux system, since it’s not very often, I have to keep looking up the basic commands for user setup.

I had started putting them in a text file and now it’s reached here!

By default when crontab-e is run for the first time, we get the choice to set the editor.

The selected editor is stored in a file ~/.selected_editor

However, if the selected editor needs to be changed later, the command is –

select-editor

To reset or unset the selected-editor completely, we can remove the ~/.selected_editor file completely.

Ref: https://www.howtogeek.com/410995/how-to-change-the-default-crontab-editor/