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up vote 6 down vote favorite

I can sudo, but I don't have the root password so I can't su root. Using sudo, can I change the root password?

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5 Answers

up vote 9 down vote accepted

So you want to run something like sudo passwd root? I don't think that this works everywhere.

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In such cases, you need just flag it for mod attention. They can transfer it to be a comment. – Tshepang Mar 17 '11 at 12:49
@Tshepang - @faif doesn't even have flagging permissions. Those require 15 rep. I've flagged the post for him. – Iszi Mar 17 '11 at 12:54
@Iszi: Oh, I actually thought everyone can flag. – Tshepang Mar 17 '11 at 12:55
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@Tshepang - New users with just 1 rep can only create non-wiki posts and comment on their own posts. See unix.stackexchange.com/privileges for more details. – Iszi Mar 17 '11 at 12:59
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I'm not aware of any systems which force root to provide the previous root password. (After all all, you could change it with sed and the /etc/shadow file.) But maybe I haven't used enough "serious systems". Can you give an example of one such system? – mattdm♦ Mar 17 '11 at 14:06
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up vote 9 down vote

You can also just use

sudo su

and keep the root account without password.

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Once I understood I can do this, I did "passwd -d root". Thanks! – ripper234 Mar 17 '11 at 13:21
But why was my answer downgraded after having been accepted ? – philfr Mar 17 '11 at 15:52
up vote 7 down vote

Try this:

sudo passwd

Note that you also wanna log in using su - instead of su (more info).

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up vote 1 down vote

you can also use sudo with the "-i" option. this will log you in as root without using the su command.

sudo -i

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up vote 1 down vote

You can change all these options in sudoers file, even make no password if you want( I would not recommend this though).

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