On 11/8/21 05:12, tempforever wrote:
[snip]> Lars Noodén via Dng wrote:
>> You could consider running sudoedit instead. That will allow you to
>> edit a file as root (or any other designated account) while still
>> running the editor itself under the unprivileged account. One should
>> not run graphical programs as root, if it can be avoided.
>>
> Thank you for the help also.  sudoedit requires user "a" to be in sudo
> group, which I'd prefer not to do.  A non-gui text editor invoked with
> su -c will work for now.

Please take another look at /etc/sudoers because the system is allowed
to have more than one group and users may be in more than one group at a
time. Also, there can be more than one single line in /etc/sudoers or
in any of the files beneath /etc/sudoers.d/

Thus you can have a group for account "a" which allows it to run
sudoedit but nothing else, and it doesn't even have to be a new group:

%a ALL=(ALL:ALL) sudoedit

See "man sudoers" for that. sudo is certanly one of the most
misunderstood and misused utilities around, in part because of the
tragic default settings spread by the Ubuntu distros, an affliction it
gets from Debian's default settings.

/Lars

PS. Thank you in advance for not top-posting.