On 8 June 2017 at 12:40, Brett Parker iDunno@sommitrealweird.co.uk wrote:
So, how about looking at the magical man page... or even sudo --help...
Fair point (I started with Google and didn't find many options, but did find this one after my post). However it's not equivalent as it then doesn't allow the jobs to be managed in the same way once started, and that rules it out for me.
As to the other suggestions: Yes, editing sudoers will work for specific cases but I don't want to avoid the password security (just avoid it being hidden in the background).
sudo myapp && bg .. looks like a good one to play with, but surely bg won't run until myapp completed?.
To expand on the reason I asked: Today I ran out of disk space and started going through a tidy up. I found some large directories (unused virtual machines that I don't want to throw away but don't really need either) that I wanted to compress. So I used: vm=vm1 ; sudo tar -cjf $vm.tar.bz2 --remove-files $vm & .. which worked fine as I had already done some tasks with sudo by that point so no password was needed.
a while later I came back (after it had finished), edited the command to backup vm2, hit enter and got on with other tasks again. Of-course my sudo session had timed out, and whilst nothing looked any different it was sat there doing nothing and I didn't realise for a few hours, when "jobs" showed me that the task was stopped.
In this scenario, unless I enable password-less sudo, /etc/sudoers doesn't help.
I did find one useful suggestion after more Googling that created a "sudobg" alias[1] which looks like the best option so far.
[1] https://askubuntu.com/questions/224649/how-to-run-a-command-asking-password-... (last answer on page)