This might be a stupid question, but hear me out.
I regularly document steps to install various software for myself on my wiki
More recently, I managed to use different custom text in the source markdown to prepend # and automatically, so commands can be copied more easily while still clarifying if it should be run as a normal user or as root.
Run command as user
$ some cool command
Run command as root/superuser with sudo
# some dangerous command
I usually remove and sudo and use the # prefix. However, in some cases, the sudo actually does something different that needs to be highlighted. For example, I might use it to execute a command as the user www-data
sudo -u www-data cp /var/www/html/html1 /var/www/html/html2
I often use as a prefix, but # would also make sense.
How would you prefix that line?
#is a standard shell prompt for root, and only for root. For commands executed by any other user, including sudo, use$.In general it is a bad practice to use
sudoin documentation because in many distros it is not available by default. I would usesufor your example. However system users have no passwords, so you need to become root first, and only after that change user to avoid prompting a password. So I would write# su -s /bin/bash www-data $ cp /var/www/html/html1 /var/www/html/html2or
# su -s /bin/sh -c 'cp /var/www/html/html1 /var/www/html/html2' www-dataBut if you are sure that
sudois installed and configured on a user’s machine, you may write$ sudo -u www-data cp /var/www/html/html1 /var/www/html/html2I disagree completely.
The bad practice is running commands directly as root. It’s fine if you prefer for your own environment but sudo is the best practice.
Additionally, which distro doesn’t have sudo? I’m sure there are some but by far the majority of distos have and use sudo.
Agreed that it’s bad practice to use
sudo.Very good idea using
su. I never thought of using it like that before.