visudo: sudoers file busy, try again later

Posted on February 4th, 2008 by Yousef Ourabi

Quick note on how to un-lock yourself from a failed visudo session.

f you’ve accidentally locked yourself out either via an accidental crtl-c or system restart and you were in the middle of editing /etc/sudoers via visudo there are two steps to take to restore it to a normal state (aka un-lock yourself)

I’ve done the following on an Ubuntu GNU/Linux system — but I’m assuming it is fairly cross-platform.

1) rm /etc/sudoers.tmp — this is the lockfile visudo creates

2) chmod u+x /etc/sudoers — visudo marks /etc/sudoers as read-only.

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Filed under: Linux


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