Probably because a *lot* of damage can be done with sudo.

dmitriid · on Aug 26, 2022

More than with Touch ID/Face ID that are used in a shit ton of places?

dhosek · on Aug 27, 2022

Yeah, one of the things I did once was use sudo emacs to edit the sudoers file (I didn’t know better) and in the process locked myself out of sudo.¹ With sudo you can muck up a lot of permissions/security that shouldn’t get mucked and backing out of that can be challenging.

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1. I was able to fix it using Repair Permissions in DiskUtil. If I were running Linux I don’t know that I could have fixed it at all, although maybe Linux is more forgiving of this sort of sin?

_abox · on Aug 28, 2022

This is why you have visudo which checks your changes before saving.

Ps just mentioning it in case you didn't know about it. I know there's still ways to lock yourself out that visudo doesn't catch.

dhosek · on Aug 29, 2022

The command back when I did this was sudoedit but I didn't know better, although I don't think it did any checking of the file for validity, just made sure that the correct permissions were in place when I was done. Now, the default sudoers file on MacOS has a comment saying to edit with visudo. But there are enough footguns possible with sudo that any friction to using it is a good thing.