Apple - How do I give a user sudo permissions?
To add a user to sudoers, as admin do sudo visudo
Then scroll down to
# User privilege specification
root ALL=(ALL) ALL
%admin ALL=(ALL) ALL
place the cursor at the next (empty) line, and press a
(for append). Then type
shortname ALL=(ALL) ALL
where shortname
is the short name for the user that you are adding to sudoers (there should be TAB
between the short name and ALL). After that press ESC
(to exit append mode). Then type :wq
and then Enter
to quit visudo, saving the changes.
Rather than give geoff
sudo privileges, consider adding the account to the admin
group so that it inherits the admin group sudoer privileges. This would be the more correct way to do things.
To add geoff
to the admin
group you'll need to run the following as the admin
account:
sudo dseditgroup -o edit -a geoff -t user admin
You may also want to consider putting geoff
in the wheel
group too:
sudo dseditgroup -o edit -a geoff -t user wheel
The wheel
group is a BSD-ism, where OS X has its roots. In traditional BSD systems the wheel
group was used to keep a collection of users who were allowed to become superusers using the su
command. It's not strictly necessary to be in both admin
and wheel
but anyone setup as as "Administrator" on the machine through the UI for adding a user is in both so it can't hurt to replicate that setup.