General: Forgetting to Sudo

Some of you might have noticed the "ITPro" tab at the top of the page. It took Dennis Publishing over 5 months to setup a WordPress account for me. Says a lot really!

Anyway, part of the blogging agreement is that I can re-post my posts on here when the latest post is out. Naturally, if you want to read them as I write them, you'll have to go to IT Pro - otherwise they will be here a week later. I'm still struggling a little bit with the whole blog style, as I keep switching into professional writer mode, instead of casual blogger. Hopefully I can let down my guard and end up with a similar style to that I have here (which is what they liked in the first place).

Anyone who has found themselves stuck in the Ubuntu console for a while, will know how irritating it is to type in a command and forget to have the “sudo” at the beginning, which tells the machine to the run the command elevated as the “root” user. For example.

The obvious solution is to press the up arrow to go through your history, then press home, then type in sudo. If you are on a laptop, the home key is not always particularly accessible, so I found myself holding down the left key until I reached the end. After looking into this today, there are a number of other alternatives to speed up this regular annoyance.

Firstly, in a bash console, pressing CTRL+A will simulate the home key. Secondly, a slightly easier approach is to type “sudo !!”. The explanation marks will be replaced with the last command run and your command will run as root. Now there’s a time saver!

Originally posted on ITPro.

Just noticed this. Good tip!