Wow, OK apologies for wasting everyone's time in that case but I have to say that its pretty confusing. Even within the sudoers file there are comments prefixed by a hash. But if your comment happens to start with #include it magically becomes active.
I now understand this is the intended behaviour, but in that case I'd humbly suggest that there should be another, better way of doing includes. Also, perhaps visudo should throw an error when it finds an #include that doesn't exist, rather than just exiting and then sudo refusing to do anything. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Touch seeded packages, which is subscribed to sudo in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1741398 Title: Commented line in sudoers file breaks sudo Status in sudo package in Ubuntu: Invalid Bug description: Ubuntu 16.04 Amazon AWS image. sudo: Installed: 1.8.16-0ubuntu1.5 Used sudo visudo to edit /etc/sudoers file from the ubutntu admin user At the bottom of the file is a line #includedir /etc/sudoers.d I added a couple of lines at the end of the file to give permissions to another user. I accidentally hit backspace and altered the includedir line so it looked like this #includedir /etc/sudoercs I couldn't remember what the actual directory was at the time, but I thought, hey, its a commented line, it doesn't matter anyway. I was wrong. So visudo saved the file OK, but from then on, no valid sudo commands would work for any user. Including sudo visudo of course. Its an AWS instance, so no root login. Only recourse was to detach the volume, re-attach it to another instance, fix the spelling mistake. So obviously sudo freaked when the directory given didn't exist. But why would it, if the line is a comment? Something obviously wrong here. And given the lack of root, a particularly irritating and time consuming one. To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/sudo/+bug/1741398/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~touch-packages Post to : touch-packages@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~touch-packages More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
