Make Ubuntu Stay in Root Mode

Instead of having to constantly type in ’sudo’ every time you need to make an admin change, you can use one of these commands to act as root.

To switch to full root mode:

sudo -s -H

To switch to using root mode, but still act as your user account:

sudo -s

The Geek is the founder of How-To Geek and a geek enthusiast. This article was written on 09/11/06 and tagged with: SysAdmin, Ubuntu

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Comments (6)

1. July 12, 2007 10:16 pm
   Manjula

   This is always good, if you are familiar with System Administration and you should know what you are doing

2. June 5, 2008 2:08 pm
   Alekz

   Good to know! In Fedora you would just do:

   su -

   

3. June 5, 2008 2:15 pm
   Shon

   You could also sudo bash which will keep you in root mode until you close the terminal window

4. August 25, 2008 6:23 am
   Joe

   This one does the job, too:

   sudo su

5. September 5, 2008 3:35 am
   harry

   Actually, joe, that doesn’t quite do the trick.

   sudo su – root

   is the proper way to do it. Seriously though. An entire post on switching to root? Really?

6. January 9, 2009 5:29 am
   Chiron613

   How about:

   sudo passwd

   Then enter your own password (as a regular user)

   You will be asked for root password (which might as well be the same password you use as user). As usual, it will ask you to confirm the password to avoid typos.

   Now you’re able to su whenever you need to be root for a while.

   Having said all this, it’s probably not a good idea to actually *use* su, except when you’re going to have a prolonged session as root. Typing ’sudo’ isn’t all that difficult. And if you forget after typing some long, complicated line, you can just type ’sudu !!’, and hit return. The ‘!!’ tells your shell to append the last command onto your present one (where you typed ’sudo’).