You restore the system from backup

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.

deleted by creator

deleted by creator

Personally I am of the nonanoist denomination. I will curse all the demons of hell when on a new system I type vipw or systemctl edit some.service and I am unexpectedly faced with the demon called nano. Words cannot describe how much I loathe this pityful excuse for an editor, this usurper of editing powers, this illegitimate occupier of the editor symlink. How dare you insult me, the omnipotent god called root, by presenting me with a training tool for novices?!

Fortunately, there are ancient spells that can nullify its powers. ‘I command you: be gone Satan’, I will utter under my breath as I carefully type in the magic incantation to cast it back into the fiery chasm from whence it came:

apt -y purge nano

ed

Yeah, there is only one of you.

G T F O !

-nano4lifegang

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.

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

Anger, rage and ultimately hate

These are the emotions we feel sometimes

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.

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

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

LOL, gtfo with that nonsense!

I mean if you double bang me I’m likely to do whatever you want, too.

Torvalds would like to have a word with you

I believe sudoedit disables being able to spawn commands from the editor. In vi, I think it was :!<command>

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?

I don’t use it, but, sudoedit is a little more complicated than that.

When invoked as sudoedit, the -e option (described below), is implied.

       -e, --edit
               Edit one or more files instead of running a command.   In  lieu
               of  a  path name, the string "sudoedit" is used when consulting
               the security policy.  If the user is authorized by the  policy,
               the following steps are taken:

               1.   Temporary  copies  are made of the files to be edited with
                    the owner set to the invoking user.

               2.   The editor specified by the policy is run to edit the tem‐
                    porary files.  The sudoers policy  uses  the  SUDO_EDITOR,
                    VISUAL  and  EDITOR environment variables (in that order).
                    If none of SUDO_EDITOR, VISUAL  or  EDITOR  are  set,  the
                    first  program  listed  in the editor sudoers(5) option is
                    used.

               3.   If they have been modified, the temporary files are copied
                    back to their original location and the temporary versions
                    are removed.

               To help prevent the editing of unauthorized files, the  follow‐
               ing  restrictions are enforced unless explicitly allowed by the
               security policy:

                •  Symbolic links  may  not  be  edited  (version  1.8.15  and
                   higher).

                •  Symbolic links along the path to be edited are not followed
                   when  the parent directory is writable by the invoking user
                   unless that user is root (version 1.8.16 and higher).

                •  Files located in a directory that is writable by the invok‐
                   ing user may not be edited unless that user is  root  (ver‐
                   sion 1.8.16 and higher).

               Users are never allowed to edit device special files.

               If  the specified file does not exist, it will be created.  Un‐
               like most commands run by sudo, the editor is run with the  in‐
               voking  user's  environment  unmodified.  If the temporary file
               becomes empty after editing, the user will be  prompted  before
               it is installed.  If, for some reason, sudo is unable to update
               a file with its edited version, the user will receive a warning
               and the edited copy will remain in a temporary file.

tldr: it makes a copy of the file-to-be-edited in a temp directory, owned by you, and then runs your $EDITOR as your normal user (so, with your normal editor config)

note that sudo also includes a similar command which is specifically for editing /etc/sudoers, called visudo 🤪

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.

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.

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.

Correct but it uses the SUDO_EDITOR environment variable. The benefit is more security while editing system files, it creates a temporary file and when you finish it writes changes to the original. There is more to it but that is all I know, it prevents some exploits.