Remember the lecture that you recieved when you first used sudo ?

We trust you have recieved the usual lecture from the local System Administrator. It usually boils down to these three things: #1) Respect the privacy of others. #2) Think before you type. #3) With great power comes great responsibility.

It’s a pretty nice warning and I think it’s quite unfortunate that it only appears once. Luckily, there’s a way to make it permanent. Simply open the sudoers file and in the Defaults section set the lecture to always.

# open the sudoers file using sudo visudo # under defaults add Defaults lecture=always

And congrats, the message now appears every time.

But wait, there’s more! You can take it one step further by setting a custom lecture. I thought it would be clever to display an ascii image of sudowoodo, the rock type pokemon that looks like a tree, because it’s SUDOwoodo (haha, get it?).

So make a new file with whatever message you want displayed and set the lecture_file to wherever the file is (my file was located at /etc/sudoers.lecture ).

You can find the ascii sudowoodo here.

# open the sudoers file sudo visudo # under defaults add (replace the path with your own) Defaults lecture_file=/etc/sudoers.lecture