Keeping the fancy sudo warning forever

The first time I do sudo on openSUSE I'm always warned with a someway fancy message

We trust you have received the usual lecture from the local System
Administrator. It usually boils down to these three things:

    #1) Respect the privacy of others.
    #2) Think before you type.
    #3) With great power comes great responsibility.

root's password:

After the first successful login I won't be warned again.

I'd like to be always warned. I find this message someway fancy. Is there any way to be warned like that by sudo prompt?

usr-local-ΕΨΗΕΛΩΝ

Posted 2012-11-05T18:15:03.687

Reputation: 3 733

1To be honest if this shows every time I use sudo, I will still manage to ignore it and remove root directory or something like that. This will probably only work if the warning is a 3d banner blinking with multiple color which is different every time. – Ng Sek Long – 2019-04-15T03:17:03.353

Answers

Create a file inside /etc/sudoers.d/ You can use this command

sudo nano /etc/sudoers.d/privacy

Now paste this line into the file.

Defaults        lecture = always

Now close Terminal/Konsole, Reopen it and try to do something with sudo.

Babar

Posted 2012-11-05T18:15:03.687

Reputation: 706

2Can I also disable the message by setting lecture to never? – Richard de Wit – 2017-06-14T10:16:17.757

Yes, the options for lecture are: always never once sudoers man

– Chris – 2017-11-28T04:18:11.810

Can I reduce this to one line? $ sudo echo "Defaults lecture = always" >> /etc/sudoers.d/privacy gives permission denied. – Aaron Franke – 2018-11-11T07:30:32.813

$ sudo echo "Defaults lecture = always" | sudo tee -a /etc/sudoers.d/privacy – Oliver Ni – 2019-06-18T04:32:22.993

To re-set an account to see the warning once more, delete the sudo records for that user.

root>  rm  /var/lib/sudo/<username>/*
root>  rmdir /var/lib/sudo/<username>

Michael JAMES

Posted 2012-11-05T18:15:03.687

Reputation: 49

According to man sudoers on a CentOS 7 host, the default setting for lecture_status_dir is /var/db/sudo/lectured – cherdt – 2019-12-18T17:52:01.260

To add to +Michael JAMES his statement, locations might vary. On Fedora,

rpm -ql sudo

Shows a directory called:

/var/db/sudo

In this directory i found another directory called 'lectured' followed by my name. Removing my name from this directory show the warning again.

Edit: This is a one time solution to reset showing the message. You could of course use crontab to empty the directory so that the message is printed on a more regular basis.

Riccardo

Posted 2012-11-05T18:15:03.687

Reputation: 39