Changing to root and using superpowers

We've touched upon sudo briefly and used it in some recipes, and now it is time to cover this essential command more deeply. There are also ways to become the root user and run whatever you want without having to prefix everything with sudo.

Getting ready

Stay in your terminal!

How to do it...

1. Any time someone needs elevated permissions to do something, such as installing a program or changing another user's password, if they have the appropriate permissions, they may use sudo to execute such commands. We've used apt-get several times, and if you forgot to use sudo, you will recognize these messages:

   pi@rpz14101:~/share/ch3 $ apt-get install postgresql
   
   E: Could not open lock file /var/lib/dpkg/lock - open 
      (13: Permission denied)
   E: Unable to lock the administration directory 
      (/var/lib/dpkg/), are you root?
   

2. Running the command again with sudo will sort out the issue. Instead of retyping the entire command, you can also use this trick...