Error messages produced by sudo include:
editing files in a writable directory is not permitted
By default, sudoedit does not permit editing a file when any
of the parent directories are writable by the invoking user.
This avoids a race condition that could allow the user to
overwrite an arbitrary file. See the sudoedit_checkdir
option in sudoers(5) for more information.
editing symbolic links is not permitted
By default, sudoedit does not follow symbolic links when
opening files. See the sudoedit_follow option in sudoers(5)
for more information.
effective uid is not 0, is sudo installed setuid root?
sudo was not run with root privileges. The sudo binary must
be owned by the root user and have the set-user-ID bit set.
Also, it must not be located on a file system mounted with
the 'nosuid' option or on an NFS file system that maps uid 0
to an unprivileged uid.
effective uid is not 0, is sudo on a file system with the 'nosuid'
option set or an NFS file system without root privileges?
sudo was not run with root privileges. The sudo binary has
the proper owner and permissions but it still did not run
with root privileges. The most common reason for this is
that the file system the sudo binary is located on is mounted
with the 'nosuid' option or it is an NFS file system that
maps uid 0 to an unprivileged uid.
fatal error, unable to load plugins
An error occurred while loading or initializing the plugins
specified in sudo.conf(5).
invalid environment variable name
One or more environment variable names specified via the -E
option contained an equal sign ('='). The arguments to the
-E option should be environment variable names without an
associated value.
no password was provided
When sudo tried to read the password, it did not receive any
characters. This may happen if no terminal is available (or
the -S option is specified) and the standard input has been
redirected from /dev/null.
a terminal is required to read the password
sudo needs to read the password but there is no mechanism
available for it to do so. A terminal is not present to read
the password from, sudo has not been configured to read from
the standard input, the -S option was not used, and no
askpass helper has been specified either via the sudo.conf(5)
file or the SUDO_ASKPASS environment variable.
no writable temporary directory found
sudoedit was unable to find a usable temporary directory in
which to store its intermediate files.
sudo must be owned by uid 0 and have the setuid bit set
sudo was not run with root privileges. The sudo binary does
not have the correct owner or permissions. It must be owned
by the root user and have the set-user-ID bit set.
sudoedit is not supported on this platform
It is only possible to run sudoedit on systems that support
setting the effective user-ID.
timed out reading password
The user did not enter a password before the password timeout
(5 minutes by default) expired.
you do not exist in the passwd database
Your user-ID does not appear in the system passwd database.
you may not specify environment variables in edit mode
It is only possible to specify environment variables when
running a command. When editing a file, the editor is run
with the user's environment unmodified.
