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sudo insults

January 17th, 2007 | ubuntu

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An interesting sudo feature is the ability to insult you when you type a wrong password. It has really funny phrases, see some of them:

  • I’ve seen penguins that can type better than that.
  • Maybe if you used more than just two fingers…

On Ubuntu, this feature comes disabled by default. To enable it, edit /etc/sudoers file and put “insults” word in the end of line “Defaults…”. That line will look like this:

Defaults !lecture,tty_tickets,!fqdn,insults

That’s it! Just run the sudo command and type a wrong password.

9 comments ↓

#1 eduo on 01.17.07 at 12:10

Thanks so much, bani.

Now our security logs are going through the roof while the department laughs purposedly mistyping our passwords.

I hope you’re proud :)

#2 bibe on 01.17.07 at 12:35

Very funny, thanks for the tip!
I would suggest to use visudo, that checks /etc/sudoers syntax before actually overwriting a working one.

#3 nixternal on 01.17.07 at 13:41

visudo or sudoedit :)

Definitely a fun time with sudo, seeing that I constantly type my password incorrectly :)

#4 Neil Greenwood on 01.18.07 at 8:19

Don’t edit the file! Use the commands that nixternal mentioned instead.

#5 Jad on 01.22.07 at 7:45

haha this is cool!

#6 L’ours à la campagne » Se faire insulter par sudo on 10.21.07 at 7:19

[...] Via [...]

#7 snoopdogg on 10.19.09 at 10:08

if you want this to work on a mac you need to have sudo compiled with insults.
on macports that means installing the insults variant of sudo, as in:
$ sudo port install sudo +insults

#8 Amy on 11.25.10 at 1:12

I’m having a wee bit of trouble…after sudo visudo, I don’t know how to find the Defaults line, or what keys to push

#9 Mike on 08.08.11 at 18:48

Amy – it’s usually the first line in a default file. If you don’t see it, add to the top:

Defaults insults

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