sudo as a user that has sudo rights?

Question

Alice has sudo rights. Bob does not (this is not changeable), but does know the password to Alice's account.

If Bob wants to perform administrative commands he must:

1. su alice
2. fill in Alice's password for su
3. sudo whoami
4. fill in Alice's sudo password
5. command gets executed with super user rights

To shorten this I use: su -m alice -c 'sudo whoami'.

However, I want to build an alias command that replaces with this tedious command with just the regular sudo command.

So I made this: alias sudo="su -m alice -c 'sudo $@'".

2 caveats:

• It doesn't work
• It always asks for Alice's su password, the sudo password it does remember

How can I do this better?

Thanks!

Answer 1

This depends on the sudoers configuration. If "Defaults requiretty" is set this method wont work.

suds () { 
    ARGS="$@"
    /bin/su -m alice -c "/usr/bin/sudo  TERM=xterm $ARGS"
}

A few comments about this

1. It will always ask for alices's password to authenticate the su.
2. When a variable is offset with single quotes it will not normally be expanded.
3. I tend to use functions rather than aliases they allow me to add a bit more logic to the transformations.
4. This is a bad idea from a security perspective. Make sure this doesn't violate local policies before implementing it.

Rik