I love this!

THAT’S FUCKING AWESOME. I’m STEALING YOUR BANDWITH for all five people who will see it in my LiveJournal, ok? If that’s not ok let me know and I’ll steal it download and Put it somewhere. But THAT’S FUCKING AWESOME

- GEEK ON -

sudo allows a permitted user to execute a command as the superuser or another user, as specified in the sudoers file. The real and effective uid and gid are set to match those of the target user as specified in the passwd file and the group vector is initialized based on the group file (unless the -P option was specified). If the invoking user is root or if the targetuser is the same as the invoking user, no password is required. Otherwise, sudo requires that users authenticate themselves with a password by default (NOTE: in the default configuration this is the user’s password, not the root password). Once a user has been authenticated, a timestamp is updated and the user may then use sudo without a password for a short period of time (5 minutes unless overridden in sudoers).

- GEEK OFF -

Basically sudo allows you to execute a command as another user. I often use sudo because:

1. If I make an awesomely horrible mistake or a typo (rm -rf anyone?) I am not root and permission will be denied. If I really want to make that awesomely horrible mistake I have to type “sudo awesomely horrible mistake.” It wont stop me but it will make me stop and consider, if just for a second.
2. I use a logwatch and it records all sudo activities so I now have a record of my awesomely horrible mistake.