Cannot go into Root

Question

When I enter sudo su or sudo -i in terminal on Ubuntu 12.04, I cannot become superuser. When I enter the password nothing happens. Its like:

user@host~: sudo -i
enter passwd: ******
user@host~: nothing happened

And then:

user@host~: sudo -s
root@user~: WTF?

Instead when my normal user enters sudo -s it becomes root. Wtf...?

Are you copy/pasting the full output? Please do so. It should be root@host and :~ instead of ~: — Lucio, Dec 15 '14 at 22:54
sudo -s will look at the environment for a SHELL variable before looking at the users passwd for the chosen shell. sudo -i will start at the users passwd. If a SHELL variable is declared that will probably be why. Also I am not sure if the .profile and .login will be read by sudo -s — Requist, Dec 16 '14 at 19:26

user.dz · Answer 1 · 2016-05-29T19:58:22.870

It seems you wrong default shell setup for the root user.

In 1st command sudo -i, you passed the login authentication but no shell run.
In 2nd command sudo -s, you are already passed sudo authentication which it you are only asked onces per terminal (may be it has a timeout period). However this time, it loads directly /bin/bash not shell set in the root profile.

To test this theory run:

sudo -i /bin/bash

1 Answers1