I noticed that two groups are granted similar-looking permissions in /etc/sudoers
:
# Members of the admin group may gain root privileges
%admin ALL=(ALL) ALL
# Allow members of group sudo to execute any command
%sudo ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL
My user account with "Administer the system" privileges is in the admin
group, and there don't appear to be any users in the sudo
group. What are these two groups for?
Best Answer
Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and later
Administrators are added to the
sudo
group, but theadmin
group is supported for backward compatibility. From the release notes:It is not created when you do a fresh install, though it is still present if you upgraded from previous distributions. Either way, the
admin
group appears in the/etc/sudoers
file.See implementation details and the official documentation.