Glad to help. Now that I’m back at my Mac, I can add that the commands I have added to sudoers
are these two lines.
%admin ALL=NOPASSWD: /bin/launchctl load /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.backblaze.bzserv.plist
%admin ALL=NOPASSWD: /bin/launchctl unload /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.backblaze.bzserv.plist
which will allow you to do
sudo /bin/launchctl unload /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.backblaze.bzserv.plist
or
sudo /bin/launchctl load /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.backblaze.bzserv.plist
without having to enter your password.
How to use a sudoers
file
If you aren’t familiar with the sudoers
file, BE CAREFUL. It’s dangerous. If you muck up the /etc/sudoers
file, it can be hard to undo.
Following best practices, I do not edit the main /etc/sudoers
file itself, but I have a separate file at /etc/sudoers.d/tjluoma
instead.
You can name your file whatever you want (I’ll use “whatever” as a placeholder) , but it has to be owned by root:wheel
and it has to be chmod 440
. I also think the name has to be all lowercase with no extension (i.e “.txt”).
sudo touch /etc/sudoers.d/whatever
sudo chown root:wheel /etc/sudoers.d/whatever
sudo chmod 440 /etc/sudoers.d/whatever
once you have the file in place, you want to edit it using the visudo
command, such as:
EDITOR=nano sudo visudo -f /etc/sudoers.d/whatever
Because visudo
will syntax-check the file for you.
n.b: Unless you know that your $EDITOR
is set, you’ll want to use EDITOR=nano
otherwise you’ll end up having to use vi
which is basically a torture device masquerading as a unix program; despite this, some zealots will tell you that you should learn to use vi
because some day the world might explode and vi
might be your only option. Learn to ignore those people.
You can check the syntax of your sudoers
file (and make sure it’s being checked) by running:
sudo visudo -c
which will show you all of the files that it sees, and will tell you if they are OK or not. Here’s what it looks like on my system:
% sudo visudo -c
/etc/sudoers: parsed OK
/private/etc/sudoers.d/503: parsed OK
/private/etc/sudoers.d/tjluoma: parsed OK
/private/etc/sudoers.d/traceyluoma: parsed OK
I hope this helps. Adding things to the sudoers
file is definitely a “power user” move, but, hey, that’s why we’re here, right ;-?