Administrative access via sudo and visudo

The sudo command has been mentioned several times throughout this book, so you may already understand its basics and what it does. As mentioned earlier, the basic purpose of the sudo command is to run tasks as the root user account. This is much safer than simply logging in to the computer as root, as sudo asks you for the root password, which is your reminder that the task you're about to perform is technically reserved for root. While logged into the system as root itself, there are no password prompts, even if you are about to accidentally do something catastrophic to the system. We may be technical people, but even the smartest person is prone to making a mistake from time to time. This is why sudo is generally preferred over logging in to the root account itself. As mentioned earlier, many distributions, such as Ubuntu (as well as Mint), leave the root account disabled by default. It's generally safer this way.

Although we've gone through the...