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I was playing around with the pam.d file in nano and for some reason along the way I lost root access. Whenever I try to use the sudo command, I get an error like this:

[redacted]@[redacted] ~ % sudo sh
sudo: unable to initialize PAM: No such file or directory

When I try to go into single-user mode, or use sudo - I get the same error.

This is what the pam.d file looks like. I can't edit it back.

# sudo: auth account password session
auth       sufficient     /usr/local/Cellar/pam-u2f/1.0.4/lib/pam/pam_u2f.so
auth       sufficient     pam_smartcard.so
auth       required       pam_opendirectory.so
account    required       pam_permit.so
password   required       pam_deny.so
session    required       pam_permit.so

When I try to save, I get an error message saying [ Error writing sudo: Permission denied].

I'm on a MacBook Air 2017 running 10.15.1. How do I get back root access? Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

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  • How are you entering single-user mode? Cmd+S or Cmd+V?
    – Michael
    Aug 10, 2020 at 16:40

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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This probably won't help you at this point, but for future reference, an easy way to fix it would be to set a root password and then type su to switch to the root user.

See: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204012

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