Apple - How do I increase sudo password remember timeout?
Run sudo visudo
and add this line:
Defaults timestamp_timeout=-1
See man 5 sudoers
. -1
causes the password to never timeout. You may change the number to whatever you like in minutes.
The man page for sudo
says that sudo -v
"extends the sudo timeout for another 5 minutes".
Running 'sudo visudo' instead of editing the file directly causes the system to validate the sudoers file before it commits the changes. For instance, if you leave a stray character somwhere, when you save and exit, it will say "there is an error in the sudoers file, what would you like to do?" ... hence giving you a chance to go back in and edit. This actually just happened to me 10 minutes ago.
Be really careful about modifying /etc/sudoers
directly!
For instance, I tried the above suggestion directly:
sudo sh -c 'echo "\nDefaults timestamp_timeout=-1">>/etc/sudoers'
which messed up my /etc/sudoers
file (on a CentOS Virtualbox VM). Should have been:
sudo sh -c 'echo -e "\nDefaults timestamp_timeout=-1">>/etc/sudoers'
Fortunately, I had access to the root account, logged in as root, used visudo
and repaired the problem!
So, I agree w/ the above comments to use visudo
instead.