visudo is an editor for the sudoers file -- see sudo.

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Contents

Resources

• Visudo Manual

<quote>

visudo edits the sudoers file in a safe fashion, analogous to vipw(8). visudo locks the sudoers file against multiple simultaneous edits, provides basic sanity checks, and checks for parse errors. If the sudoers file is currently being edited you will receive a message to try again later.

There is a hard-coded list of editors that visudo will use set at compile-time that may be overridden via the editor sudoers Default variable. This list defaults to the path to vi(1) on your system, as determined by the configure script. Normally, visudo does not honor the EDITOR or VISUAL environment variables unless they contain an editor in the aforementioned editors list. However, if visudo is configured with the --with-enveditor flag or the enveditor Default variable is set in sudoers, visudo will use any the editor defines by EDITOR or VISUAL. Note that this can be a security hole since it allows the user to execute any program they wish simply by setting EDITOR or VISUAL.

</quote>

Contributors

• RandyKramer - 06 Apr 2002
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