43

Do we need to reboot after adding a user to /etc/sudoers?

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2
  • Have you tried running sudo before rebooting?
    – kos
    Aug 27, 2015 at 10:05
  • @kos have you down voted according to your comment ? if yes then you got my question wrongly.
    – Ashish Karpe
    Jan 12, 2017 at 11:46

5 Answers 5

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39

No. It'll work with the next sudo command.

But if it does not work, you can avoid rebooting by running 

sudo service sudo restart
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  • 3
    On my 14.04 system it did not work with the next sudo command. I needed to do sudo service sudo restart (Rebooting would have worked too, I guess. Bit overkill though.)
    – Nick Rice
    Jun 2, 2018 at 6:32
  • 29
    Failed to restart sudo.service: Unit sudo.service is masked.?
    – xeruf
    Nov 13, 2020 at 11:41
  • sudo is masked, which means most systemctl commands don't work with it. There is no need to restart anything after sudoedit, though, so there shouldn't be a need to restart the sudo "service." Read more here: askubuntu.com/questions/816285/…
    – gonzojive
    May 30, 2022 at 6:53
11

I just did this and yes, I did in fact have to reboot. So, maybe the previous answer wasn't wrong, but it definitely isn't right 100% of the time. Writing this in case someone else is looking for the answer as I just was.

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4
  • 2
    I had to reboot as well.
    – Nathan B
    Feb 12, 2018 at 10:12
  • 1
    Instead of rebooting you can do sudo service sudo restart
    – Nick Rice
    Jun 2, 2018 at 6:32
  • @NickRice any idea on what to do in Arch Linux?
    – Necktwi
    Aug 5, 2018 at 3:50
  • 25
    What if $sudo service sudo restart outputs 'Failed to restart sudo.service: Unit sudo.service is masked.'
    – user2066480
    Aug 2, 2019 at 12:31
2

In CentOS 7 you can also Logout from the system with "exit" and Login again and the Sudoers will be updated.

I've tested on minimal installation but I believe it works in other targets and possibly other distributions aswell.

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1

In fact the only thing you need is to get a (new) login prompt, so using the following command works:

anyuser$ su -l <user>
user$ sudo <thenewlysudoedcommand>
... works...

But if you are logged in as GUI, then you need to logout & login again.

But, as with MOST linux tools you DON'T need to reboot the computer (that's a Windows thing).

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1

After add user to sudo group,

#su - root -c "usermod -aG sudo username;"

execute following command:

newgrp sudo

And after that you can use sudo in your commands in current session without need to restart.

Also if you are in a shell script and you want to execute command just after add user to sudoers, run following command instead:

#su - root -c "usermod -aG sudo username;"
sg sudo -c 'sudo command1; sudo command2;'

And If you don't want to reapeat sudo word in each command do as follow:

sg sudo -c "sudo -- sh -c 'command1; command2;'"

OR

sg sudo -c "sudo -- sh -c '
 command1
 command2
'"
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