Documenting commands # or $ before sudo?
Documenting commands # or $ before sudo?
This might be a stupid question, but hear me out.
I regularly document steps to install various software for myself on my wiki
More recently, I managed to use different custom text in the source markdown to prepend # and $ automatically, so commands can be copied more easily while still clarifying if it should be run as a normal user or as root.
Run command as user
$ some cool command
Run command as root/superuser with sudo
# some dangerous command
I usually remove and sudo and use the # prefix. However, in some cases, the sudo actually does something different that needs to be highlighted. For example, I might use it to execute a command as the user www-data
sudo -u www-data cp /var/www/html/html1 /var/www/html/html2
I often use $ as a prefix, but # would also make sense.
How would you prefix that line?
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I have a fairly opinionated stance on this. Except in your sudo example where you’re specifically using sudo for a reason, I document all commands as non-root, and do not instruct them to raise privs. Whether or not they have, want or need privs, and how they raise them, is their system not mine.
It’s not exactly user friendly, but I don’t like to encourage people to blindly copy & paste commands that raise privs. That should be a conscious decision where they stop and ask themselves if & why it’s necessary.