Mario. Web Developer, Snowboarding Addict

Recover /etc/sudoers in Ubuntu 12.04

Submitted by mario on Fri, 25/05/2012 - 12:52

Note: you should always 'sudo visudo' to edit the sudoers file, it validates the file and thus will prevent you ending up in this situation in the first place!

So I went to edit /etc/sudoers, and mistakenly assumed that the '#' in front of the includedir directive line was a comment. It is not.

So now, if you're silly like me and you weren't making changes as root, you can't sudo to fix your sudo. Oh the irony.

You'll need to:

  • Reboot into recovery mode (hit escape during boot, choose the recovery mode option on the grub screen)
  • Choose the 'Enable networking' option (if you don't your filesystem will be mounted as read-only. who knew)
  • Chosee the 'Drop to root shell' option
  • run visudo, fix your file
  • Reboot with normal grub option
Tags:  tidbit ubuntu 12.04 recovery

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