Have you ever used the command line tool 'sudo' and wondered how it could all be made easier? An article on AFP548, "Essential Sudoers," details its usage and how you can configure the tool to be more user- and admin-friendly. If you've ever had to run a command as root and didn't want to fully asSUme the root identity, you've had to make use of the sudo tool. However, most people are unaware of all the handy features the tool offers like audits of sudo activity and the fine-grained control offered to machine administrators:
The sudo (superuser do) command is a very useful and powerful part of the OS X unix underpinnings. It gives the ability for certain users to execute some or all commands as root while logging these activities providing a clear bread-trail of who did what to the machine. By default only an administrative user can use sudo on any OS X machine, but with some modification of the sudoers file, you can grant specific machines and/or users access to sudo some or all of their commands.
As the administrator of a machine, you can restrict which users can use sudo and even restrict them to sudo'ing specific programs or command line tools. This information would come in especially useful in an education environment or any other similar environment when you might need to let users of a machine use sudo for specific purposes without giving them wholesale root access to the computer.