I’ve learned something new today, Sudo. Sudo is a Unix command that allows system administrators to give certain users the ability to run some or all commands as root. Why? Well, I have this program called Bluefish which I use as a HTML editor. I have to run Bluefish as root to modify my webroot directory. I could have ran Bluefish as a regular user, but I didn’t want to use my home directory to shuttle back and forth the modified web pages.

The normal way of starting Bluefish as root was to open up a terminal, su as root, then start the application from the command line. There’s a better way of doing this. Sudo automates all the commands I mentioned above. Now, I have an icon on the Linux desktop that fires up Bluefish automatically. There’s even a feature to supress passwords. I like Sudo so much, I created another icon for Yum updates. Pretty neat. Thanks to Ubuntu for giving me an idea. Ubuntu uses sudo quite extensively.