Disabling need for sudo password for a single command

Question

I would like to force the user to authenticate with his password, everytime he issues a command with "sudo". However, there is one command (an init script) that I want to exclude from that need. This single command should be able to be run as sudo without the need of a password. Any idea if this is possible? Or do I need to set up a different user account for this with the only right being to call the command?

Answer 1

 mirko    ALL=(ALL) ALL, NOPASSWD: /sbin/service blah start

The sudoers manpage describes this in great detail.

Answer 2

as sudoers manpage is too complex, needs more examples in the beggining, like a quick help...

I think this provides good restricted access:

yourUserName ALL=NOPASSWD:/usr/bin/startx -- \:1
yourUserName ALL=NOPASSWD:/usr/sbin/firestarter --start-hidden

in these above 2 examples, you prevent other commands like "firestarter --stop" what would be hazardous without password;

and "startx -- :1" (you cant use in sudoers "startx -- :1", without "\", will fail, so this is a tip), you can bind it to a key like Super+F8 (xterm -e "/usr/bin/startx -- :1"), so if your X gets messed (like while playing a 3D game) you can hit Super+F8 and get a new X to fix it all (as on ubuntu the ctrl+alt+f1 many times give us a blank screen..)