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by HackerLemon 861 days ago
What's the difference from opening a Terminal (Admin) window? Just that you can run a single command as admin? I must be missing something here
3 comments

Opening a terminal in admin window which means any commands you put in that windows will always have admin privilege, no matter what.

What does Sudo is to only provide the root/admin privileges for specific inputted command. Once it is done, it goes back to user privileges. This way, the terminal window didn't need to end the session to go back to user privileges.

Why is admin privilidge even a thing? Ask for the god damn specific resource you want access to and I'll answer yes or no!
"Admin"'s identity is the resource you're asking permissions to use. If don't want identities, are you going to manually authorize every file that needs to be interacted with? For a recursive delete of thousands of files?
You would authorize deletion in a specific directory.
Is that the shiny new capabilities based future that never arrives?
That's a very slim proposition value, especially when multiple commands in a row require admin privileges.
Sudo also allows you to control which commands can be elevated to admin.

It also lets you elevate to admin without knowing the admin password, you elevate with your normal account password. Effectively, some commands can execute as admin, but the user generally cannot.

So you can allow limited administration without giving everything away.

Good thing they're keeping the admin terminal too so you can just keep using that.

Personally I think it's way more likely the admin command is the one off like installing something, changing a setting and then everything else before and between it are user commands that don't need to be in admin space most of the time.

That's like saying (in a Linux context) "sudo is dumb because you can just use su". The two tools have different use cases.
> Just that you can run a single command as admin?

I mean, that's sudo's whole thing! [1] You can live your day to day terminal life without the risk of borking things too badly, then when you occasionally need to elevate to higher privileges you can do it easily for that specific command.

[1] Technically not the whole thing obviously, but it's a very common use case.

That has nothing to do with sudo; you could do the same with su -c long before sudo existed...
If you know the root password
Defaults targetpw

The point of sudo is not which password is used, whatsoever.

It's faster and it keeps your current directory, opening a new Terminal starts in the default directory.

It's a convenience thing.