Sudo password incorrect all of a sudden

passwordsudo

sudo ls

All of a sudden it says password incorrect. I am 100% sure of my password. I don't know what happened. Hacked ?

Best Answer

Have you verified your password is correct by authenticating through the GUI? An easy way is to go to System Preferences > Accounts and click the lock icon. Also, verify that your user account has not lost administrative privileges (you can do this from the same preference pane). If you've lost administrative privileges the issue may be related to something else.

Related Solutions

Sudo requires root password

If your user is an admin, they should (by default) be able to use sudo (based on the contents of the sudoers file).

If you re-enable the root user, and examine the contents of the file at /etc/sudoers, you should find this line (which specifies that the admin group has the ability to use sudo):

%admin  ALL=(ALL) ALL

It may be a good idea to confirm that "phil" is in the admin users group. You can perfom this check on the command line using this command (after you've re-enabled root, of course):

sudo dseditgroup -o checkmember -m phil admin

It's also possible that the rootpw flag may be set in the /etc/sudoers file (this should be off by default). If you find the following line in that file, see if deleting it will help:

Defaults rootpw

Sudo: /etc/sudoers is owned by uid 501, should be 0

You can boot into single user mode by pressing Cmd-S on startup (see OS X: How to start up in single-user or verbose mode for details) which should give you a root shell. Then run

mount -uw /
chown root:wheel /etc/sudoers
chmod 440 /etc/sudoers
reboot

to fix the problem and restart.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Sudo requires root password

Sudo: /etc/sudoers is owned by uid 501, should be 0

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