prompts in command examples

[Murray McAllister]

On Sun, Oct 5, 2008 at 8:28 AM, Jason Taylor <jmtaylor90 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 2008-10-03 at 08:20 +1000, Murray McAllister wrote:
>> On Fri, Oct 3, 2008 at 2:32 AM, Karsten 'quaid' Wade <kwade at redhat.com> wrote:
>> >
>> > On Wed, 2008-10-01 at 22:32 -0400, Paul W. Frields wrote:
>> >
>> >> Note that the su command removes the need for the user to look for
>> >> niggling prompt details.  It also clarifies that the user should
>> >> expect a prompt for the root password.
>> >
>> > In part of that discussion with the Content Services team, we discussed
>> > the need for sudo to be enabled by default.  One person was in favor of
>> > having each document specify how to enable sudo, but I don't like that
>> > rat hole.  That is another point we could discuss, however, if any
>> > Anonymous Cowards are interested in fixing the common usage.  Meanwhile,
>> > I'm advocating for a sane sudo-by-default in future Fedora versions so
>> > we can stop having to use 'su -c'.
>> >
>> > - Karsten
>>
>> I leave this out. I have text preceding the command saying "Run the
>> following command as the Linux root user:", because I'm too lazy to
>> decide between sudo or su ;)
>
> I agree that a standard for documentation purposes of using 'su -c' or
> 'sudo' is a good thing. On a tangent, however, I have noticed with sudo
> that it doesn't always find the command that the user is trying to run.
> For example, try and run restorecon as sudo. It doesn't work
> out-of-the-box at least for me anyway.
>
> -Jason

Not that it helps for previous versions, but new users on
rawhide/Fedora 10 get all paths (not sure of the correct terminology),
so running sudo for anything just works:

[newuser at localhost ~]$ echo $PATH
/usr/lib/qt-3.3/bin:/usr/kerberos/bin:/usr/local/bin:/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/home/newuser/bin

Lars E. Pettersson wrote to fedora-desktop-list, "Why not instead try
to educate people to use a really strong password for root, only use
root when necessary, and perhaps teach them to add certain
not-that-dangerous-commands to sudo?"[1]

Probably too much hassle, but at the start of each guide, you could
document how to add only the commands used in the guide to Cmnd_Alias
in "/etc/sudoers".

Cheers.

[1] <https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-desktop-list/2008-October/msg00007.html>