Linux Is Good

Thu 09 October 2003
By John Mark Schofield in Technology
Tagged as: Linux

There's a command in Linux / Unix called "sudo" which temporarily gives a normal user the power of the root user. In non-geek mixed metaphors, instead of having limited access, you have a backstage pass which lets you do absolutely anything on the system. (Of course, the command needs a password, so not just anybody on the system can run sudo and become root.) When you use the sudo command for the first time, it prints out the following message:

We trust you have received the usual lecture from the local System

Administrator. It usually boils down to these three things:

#1) Respect the privacy of others.

#2) Think before you type.

#3) With great power comes great responsibility.

Something about that just strikes me as cool. You'd never see a message like that in a Microsoft product.