[nylug-talk] no sudoedit on RHEL/CentOS

[N.J. Thomas]

* Peter C. Norton <spacey-nylug at lenin.net> [2007-04-05 10:56:43 -0700]:
> > I think you misunderstand what sudoedit does. The reason it exists
> > is to prevent editors that spawn shells from getting root access.
> 
> Hmm... It LD_PRELOADs and blocks every pipe, exec*, etc. call?
> I'll look into that sometime.

sudoedit works by making a copy of the file you want to edit into /tmp,
forks off $EDITOR, and when you are done, it copies the file back into
place. Your editor can do whatever it wants -- because you don't have
elevated privileges when you are editing the file. That's the beauty of
sudoedit.

OP: Your sysadmin might have not installed sudoedit, check if sudo -e
works. Otherwise your distro might not be new enough, check the latest
version for sudoedit.

Thomas