Sudo Development Releases

Current Development Release

The current development releases of sudo are 1.8.4rc1 and 1.7.9rc1.
Binary packages are also available for the development releases.

For full details see the ChangeLog file or view the commit logs of the 1.8 or 1.7 branch in mercurial.

If you plan to use a development release of sudo, please subscribe to the sudo-workers mailing list so that you will receive updates on bug fixes and related announcements. You may also be interested in the sudo-commits mailing list which receives a message for each commit to the sudo source tree.

Major changes between version 1.8.4b5 and 1.8.4rc1:

Fixed a problem with "sudo -g group" on FreeBSD where the kernel stores the effective gid as the first entry in the supplemental group list.
The NOEXEC option now works when an SELinux role is specified.
Fixed a race condition introduced in 1.8.4b1 when I/O logging is abled that resulted in the exit value to usually be 1 instead of the command's actual exit value.
Fixed a potential off-by-one when making a copy of the environment for LD_PRELOAD insertion.
sudo is now built with _FORTIFY_SOURCE enabled where supported.

Major changes between version 1.8.4b4 and 1.8.4b5:

"make check" will now only run the compat regress tests for compat objects we actually build and not test the system versions.
Fixed a regression introduced in 1.8.4b1 that caused a problem with pipelines when I/O logging is not enabled.

Major changes between version 1.8.4b3 and 1.8.4b4:

No longer prepend "/dev/" to the devicename if devname() returns a fully-qualified pathname. This should never happen.
The packages now include the parent directories in case they don't already exist. This fixes a directory permissions problem with the AIX package when the /usr/local directories don't already exist.

Major changes between version 1.8.4b2 and 1.8.4b3:

The full path to the controlling terminal is once again passed to the plugin on BSD systems. This was broken in sudo 1.8.3b2.
The output of "visudo -c" now lists any include files that were checked. Previously, only the main sudoers file was listed.

Major changes between version 1.8.4b1 and 1.8.4b2:

On BSD systems the controlling terminal is now determined via sysctl() when possible. This usually allows sudo to find the tty name even when standard input, output and error are redirected to /dev/null.
Fixed a compilation error on FreeBSD.
The testsudoers program now uses the debugging framework.
Updated Esperanto, Finnish, Polish and Ukrainian translations from translationproject.org.

Major changes between version 1.8.3p1 and 1.8.4b1:

The -D flag in sudo has been replaced with a more general debugging framework that is configured in sudo.conf.
Fixed a false positive in visudo strict mode when aliases are in use.
Fixed a crash with "sudo -i" when a runas group was specified without a runas user.
The line on which a syntax error is reported in the sudoers file is now more accurate. Previously it was often off by a line.
Fixed a bug where stack garbage could be printed at the end of the lecture when the "lecture_file" option was enabled.
"make install" now honors the LINGUAS environment variable.
The #include and #includedir directives in sudoers now support relative paths. If the path is not fully qualified it is expected to be located in the same directory of the sudoers file that is including it.
Serbian translation for sudo from translationproject.org.
LDAP-based sudoers may now access by group ID in addition to group name.
visudo will now fix the mode on the sudoers file even if no changes are made unless the -f option is specified.
The "use_loginclass" sudoers option works properly again.
On systems that use login.conf, "sudo -i" now sets environment variables based on login.conf.
For LDAP-based sudoers, values in the search expression are now escaped as per RFC 4515.
The plugin close function is now properly called when a login session is killed (as opposed to the actual command being killed). This can happen when an ssh session is disconnected or the terminal window is closed.
The deprecated "noexec_file" sudoers option is no longer supported.
Fixed a race condition when I/O logging is not enabled that could result in tty-generated signals (e.g. control-C) being received by the command twice.
If none of the standard input, output or error are connected to a tty device, sudo will now check its parent's standard input, output or error for the tty name on systems with /proc. This allow tty-based tickets to work properly even when, e.g. standard input, output and error are redirected to /dev/null.
Added the --enable-kerb5-instance configure option to allow people using Kerberos V authentication to specify a custom instance so the principal name can be, e.g. "username/sudo" similar to how ksu uses "username/root".
Fixed a bug where a pattern like "/usr/*" included /usr/bin/ in the results, which would be incorrectly be interpreted as if the sudoers file had specified a directory.

Major changes between version 1.8.3rc4 and 1.8.3rc5:

Added new Japanese translation from translationproject.org.
The LOGNAME, USER and USERNAME environment variables are preserved correctly again in sudoedit mode.
The group list is now reallocated correctly when the initial size guess is too small.

Major changes between version 1.8.3rc3 and 1.8.3rc4:

Sudo will now work correctly with LDAP-based sudoers using TLS or SSL on Debian systems.

Major changes between version 1.8.3rc2 and 1.8.3rc3:

A symbol conflict with the pam_ssh_agent_auth PAM module that would cause a crash been resolved.
The inability to load a group provider plugin is no longer a fatal error.
A potential crash in the utmp handling code has been fixed.
Two PAM session issues have been resolved. In previous versions of sudo, the PAM session was opened as one user and closed as another. Additionally, if no authentication was performed, the PAM session would never be closed.
Added new Italian translation from translationproject.org.

Major changes between version 1.8.3rc1 and 1.8.3rc2:

Added Italian translation for sudo from translationproject.org
Updated TROUBLESHOOTING file to match the current state of things.
Fixes namespace collision that caused a crash with pam_ssh_agent_auth.
Fixed some warnings on FreeBSD.

Major changes between version 1.8.2 and 1.8.3rc1:

Fixed expansion of strftime() escape sequences in the log_dir sudoers setting.
Added new Esperanto translation from translationproject.org.
Sudo will now use PAM by default on AIX 6 and higher.
Added --enable-werror configure option for gcc's -Werror flag.
Visudo no longer assumes all editors support the +linenumber command line argument. It now uses a whitelist of editors known to support the option.
Fixed matching of network addresses when a netmask is specified but the address is not the first one in the CIDR block.
The configure script now check whether or not errno.h declares the errno variable. Previously, sudo would always declare errno itself for older systems that don't declare it in errno.h.
The NOPASSWD tag is now honored for denied commands too, which matches historic sudo behavior (prior to sudo 1.7.0).
Sudo now honors the DEREF setting in ldap.conf which controls how alias dereferencing is done during an LDAP search.

Major changes between version 1.8.1rc11 and 1.8.2rc12:

Fixed a problem with the AIX authentication support that could prevent a user from authenticating.

Major changes between version 1.8.1rc10 and 1.8.2rc11:

Regenerated configure with autoconf 2.68 and libtool 2.4.
Rename libsudoers convenience library to libparsesudoers to avoid libtool confusion.

Major changes between version 1.8.1rc9 and 1.8.2rc10:

New Danish sudoers translation from translationproject.org.
Updated Finish, Polish, Russian and Ukrainian translations from translationproject.org.
The runas_default setting in LDAP-enabled sudoers works correctly again when specified in a sudoRole other than defaults. This stopped working in sudo 1.7.0.

Major changes between version 1.8.1rc8 and 1.8.2rc9:

Added new Russian sudo translation and updated Chinese (simplified), Finish, Polish and Ukranian translations from translationproject.org.
The sudo front end now escapes the command args for "sudo -i" and "sudo -s" before calling the plugin instead of after. Otherwise, spaces in the command args cannot be handled properly. The sudoers plugin will unescape non- spaces to make matching easier.
Fixed some potential problems found by the clang static analyzer, none serious.

Major changes between version 1.8.1rc7 and 1.8.2rc8:

Updated Polish translation from translationproject.org.
Fixed a crash in the sudoers plugin when trying to run a command as a non-existent user if Linux audit support is enabled.
The fallback group matching code in sudoers is no longer needed and has been removed.
On Mac OS X, getgrouplist() is used by the sudo front-end to get the invoking user's group list instead of getgroups(). As a result, the sudoers plugin no longer needs to use mbr_check_membership() as group matching can be done by name instead.

Major changes between version 1.8.1rc6 and 1.8.2rc7:

New Polish translation from translationproject.org.
Several fixes have been made to the new group matching code in sudoers.
sudo -i command now works correctly with bash version 2.x at the expense of bash 1.x support.
Fixed an off-by-one error introduced in the new word wrap code for file logging.
RHEL 4 packages are no longer built with --with-pam-login since we don't ship an /etc/pam.d/sudo-i file for that release.
Fixed a build error when the --without-noexec configure option is specified.
The "noexec" feature is now disabled by default for AIX 4.x and lower; LDR_PRELOAD support is only available in AIX 5.3 and above.

Major changes between version 1.8.1rc5 and 1.8.2rc6:

When matching groups in the sudoers file, sudo will now match based on the name of the group instead of the group ID. This can substantially reduce the number of group lookups for sudoers files that contain a large nummber of groups.

Major changes between version 1.8.1rc4 and 1.8.2rc5:

sudo -i command now works correctly with the bash shell. Previously, the .bash_profile would not be sourced prior to running the command unless bash was built with NON_INTERACTIVE_LOGIN_SHELLS enabled. Many Linux distributions build bash with this option enabled.

Major changes between version 1.8.1rc3 and 1.8.2rc4:

The use_pty sudoers option is now correctly passed back to the sudo front end. This was missing in previous versions of sudo 1.8 which prevented use_pty from being honored.
New Danish translation and updated Chinese (simplified) translation from translationproject.org.

Major changes between version 1.8.1rc2 and 1.8.2rc3:

The SHELL environment variable is now preserved by default when sudo -s is run.
When installing /etc/sudoers via binary package on non-RPM and non-Debian systems, the owner and mode are now set explicitly in the postinstall script instead of relying on "cp -p". On AIX 6.1 at least, the postinstall script runs before permissions are set on files in the root part of the package.
Locale files are now removed by "make uninstall".
Added Basque translation from translationproject.org and updated Finish and Ukranian translations.
Plugins are now loaded with RTLD_GLOBAL instead of RTLD_LOCAL. This fixes problems with, e.g., PAM modules not having access to symbols provided by libpam on some platforms. Affects FreeBSD and SLES at least.

Major changes between version 1.8.1rc1 and 1.8.2rc2:

Sudo now includes NLS translations for Finish, Ukrainian and simplified Chinese.
I/O logging is now supported for commands run in background mode (using sudo's -b flag).
Visudo now checks the contents of an alias and warns about cycles when the alias is expanded.
If the user specifes a group via sudo's -g option that matches the target user's group in the password database, it is now allowed even if no groups are present in the Runas_Spec.

Major changes between version 1.8.1 and 1.8.2rc1:

Added a workaround for a FreeBSD bug with dlopen() and non-standard PAM modules.
Sudo, visudo, sudoreplay and the sudoers plug-in now have natural language support (NLS). Sudo will use gettext(), if available, to display translated messages. This can be disabled by passing configure the --disable-nls option.
Group ownership of the sudoers file is only enforced when the file mode on sudoers allows group readability or writability.
The sudo Makefiles now have more complete dependencies which are automatically generated instead of being maintained manually.

Major changes between version 1.8.1rc1 and 1.8.1rc3:

Sudo now parses command line arguments before loading any plugins. This allows "sudo -V" or "sudo -h" to work even if there is a problem with sudo.conf
Plugins are now linked with the static version of libgcc to allow the plugin to run on a system where no shared libgcc is installed, or where it is installed in a different location.
Fixed the fnmatch and glob regress tests on non-BSD systems.
Fixed and documented the --with-plugindir configure option.
If there is an error making one of the subdirectories, make will now exit with an error instead of continuing.
Fixed shell warnings when --without-skey, --without-opie, --without-kerb4, --without-kerb5 or --without-SecurID were specified.
Sudoers and visudo versions now include the sudoers grammar version.
LDFLAGS is now honored in the plugin Makefile.in files.

Major changes between version 1.8.1b4 and 1.8.1rc1:

Fixed a bug introduced in sudo 1.8.1b2 on systems without a native isblank() function that prevented Defaults lines from parsing correctly.

Major changes between version 1.8.1b3 and 1.8.1b4:

The %#gid syntax is now fully functional and documented.
Fixed a build problem on HP-UX.
If there is an existing sudoers file, verify that it parses properly before installing sudo via make install.
The testsudoers utility now supports runas groups and has more useful return values.
Fixed a crash when unrecognized escapes were used in an iolog file or dir.
Removed redundant AIX-specified code when setting resource limits.

Major changes between version 1.8.1b2 and 1.8.1b3:

The sudoers parser now treats a newline in the middle of a double quoted string as an error unless a line continuation character was used. Previously, the text between the double quote and the newline was discarded.
Fixed a potential crash when a non-regular file (e.g. a directory) is present in an includedir.
When the -V flag is specified, the main sudo version is now printed even if the policy plugin cannot be initialized.
A uid or gid is now allowed in per-user and per-runas Defaults entries.
The sudoers parser now returns an error when an empty string is found where a word was expected.
Fixed printing of ALL in an Alias in testsudoers.

Major changes between version 1.8.1b1 and 1.8.1b2:

Whitespace is now allowed after the modifier in a Defaults entry. E.g. Defaults: username set_home
The sudoers parser now returns an error for a Defaults line that comes immediately after a line continuation character.
Additional sudoers parser regression tests.

Major changes between version 1.8.0 and 1.8.1b1:

A new LDAP setting, sudoers_search_filter, has been added to ldap.conf. This setting can be used to restrict the set of records returned by the LDAP query. Based on changes from Matthew Thomas.
White space is now permitted within a User_List when used in conjunction with a per-user Defaults definition.
Support for double-quoted words in the sudoers file has been fixed. The change in 1.7.5 for escaping the double quote character caused the double quoting to only be available at the beginning of an entry.
The fix for resuming a suspended shell in 1.7.5 caused problems with resuming non-shells on Linux. Sudo will now save the process group ID of the program it is running on suspend and restore it when resuming, which fixes both problems.
A bug that could result in corrupted output in "sudo -l" has been fixed.
Sudo will now create an entry in the utmp (or utmpx) file when allocating a pseudo-tty (e.g. when logging I/O). The "set_utmp" and "utmp_runas" sudoers file options can be used to control this. Other policy plugins may use the "set_utmp" and "utmp_user" entries in the command_info list.
The sudoers policy now stores the TSID field in the logs even when the "iolog_file" sudoers option is defined to a value other than %{sessid}. Previously, the TSID field was only included in the log file when the "iolog_file" option was set to its default value.
The sudoreplay utility now supports arbitrary session IDs. Previously, it would only work with the base-36 session IDs that the sudoers plugin uses by default.
Sudo now passes "run_shell=true" to the policy plugin in the settings list when sudo's -s command line option is specified. The sudoers policy plugin uses this to implement the "set_home" sudoers option which was missing from sudo 1.8.0.
The "noexec" functionality has been moved out of the sudoers policy plugin and into the sudo front-end, which matches the behavior documented in the plugin writer's guide. As a result, the path to the noexec file is now specified in the sudo.conf file instead of the sudoers file.
On Solaris 10, the PRIV_PROC_EXEC privilege is now used to implement the "noexec" feature. Previously, this was implemented via the LD_PRELOAD environment variable.
The exit values for "sudo -l", "sudo -v" and "sudo -l command" have been fixed in the sudoers policy plugin.
The sudoers policy plugin now passes the login class, if any, back to the sudo front-end.
The sudoers policy plugin was not being linked with requisite libraries in certain configurations.

Major changes between version 1.7.9b2 and 1.7.9rc1:

Fixed a race condition introduced in 1.7.9b1 when I/O logging is abled that resulted in the exit value to usually be 1 instead of the command's actual exit value.
sudo is now built with _FORTIFY_SOURCE enabled where supported.

Major changes between version 1.7.9b1 and 1.7.9b2:

Fixed a regression introduced in 1.7.9b1 that caused a problem with pipelines when I/O logging is not enabled.
The packages now include the parent directories in case they don't already exist. This fixes a directory permissions problem with the AIX package when the /usr/local directories don't already exist.

Major changes between version 1.7.8 and 1.7.9b1:

Fixed a false positive in visudo strict mode when aliases are in use.
The line on which a syntax error is reported in the sudoers file is now more accurate. Previously it was often off by a line.
The #include and #includedir directives in sudoers now support relative paths. If the path is not fully qualified it is expected to be located in the same directory of the sudoers file that is including it.
visudo will now fix the mode on the sudoers file even if no changes are made unless the -f option is specified.
The "use_loginclass" sudoers option works properly again.
For LDAP-based sudoers, values in the search expression are now escaped as per RFC 4515.
Fixed a race condition when I/O logging is not enabled that could result in tty-generated signals (e.g. control-C) being received by the command twice.
If none of the standard input, output or error are connected to a tty device, sudo will now check its parent's standard input, output or error for the tty name on systems with /proc and BSD systems that support the KERN_PROC_PID sysctl. This allows tty-based tickets to work properly even when, e.g. standard input, output and error are redirected to /dev/null.
Fixed a bug where a pattern like "/usr/*" included /usr/bin/ in the results, which would be incorrectly be interpreted as if the sudoers file had specified a directory.
"visudo -c" will now list any include files that were checked in addition to the main sudoers file when everything parses OK.
Users that only have read-only access to the sudoers file may now run "visudo -c". Previously, write permissions were required even though no writing is down in check-only mode.

Major changes between version 1.7.8rc3 and 1.7.8rc5:

The LOGNAME, USER and USERNAME environment variables are preserved correctly again in sudoedit mode.

Major changes between version 1.7.8rc2 and 1.7.8rc3:

Two PAM session issues have been resolved. In previous versions of sudo, the PAM session was opened as one user and closed as another. Additionally, if no authentication was performed, the PAM session would never be closed.

Major changes between version 1.7.8rc1 and 1.7.8rc2:

Updated TROUBLESHOOTING file to match the current state of things.
Fixed some warnings on FreeBSD.
sudo -n -l now works correctly.

Major changes between version 1.7.7 and 1.7.8rc1:

Sudo will now use PAM by default on AIX 6 and higher.
Added --enable-werror configure option for gcc's -Werror flag.
Visudo no longer assumes all editors support the +linenumber command line argument. It now uses a whitelist of editors known to support the option.
Fixed matching of network addresses when a netmask is specified but the address is not the first one in the CIDR block.
The configure script now check whether or not errno.h declares the errno variable. Previously, sudo would always declare errno itself for older systems that don't declare it in errno.h.
The NOPASSWD tag is now honored for denied commands too, which matches historic sudo behavior (prior to sudo 1.7.0).
Sudo now honors the "DEREF" setting in ldap.conf which controls how alias dereferencing is done during an LDAP search.

Major changes between version 1.7.6p2 and 1.7.7rc1:

I/O logging is now supported for commands run in background mode (using sudo's -b flag).
Group ownership of the sudoers file is now only enforced when the file mode on sudoers allows group readability or writability.
Visudo now checks the contents of an alias and warns about cycles when the alias is expanded.
If the user specifes a group via sudo's -g option that matches the target user's group in the password database, it is now allowed even if no groups are present in the Runas_Spec.
sudo -i command now works correctly with the bash version 2.0 and higher. Previously, the .bash_profile would not be sourced prior to running the command unless bash was built with NON_INTERACTIVE_LOGIN_SHELLS defined.
Multi-factor authentication is now supported on AIX.
Added support for non-RFC 4517 compliant LDAP servers that require that seconds be present in a timestamp, such as Tivoli Directory Server.
If the group vector is to be preserved, the PATH search for the command is now done with the user's original group vector.
For LDAP-based sudoers, the runas_default sudoOption now works properly in a sudoRole that contains a sudoCommand.
Spaces in command line arguments for sudo -s and sudo -i are now escaped with a backslash when checking the sudoers file.

Major changes between version 1.7.6b3 and 1.7.6b4:

The %#gid syntax is now fully functional and documented.
If there is an existing sudoers file, verify that it parses properly before installing sudo via make install.
The testsudoers utility now supports runas groups and has more useful return values.
Removed redundant AIX-specified code when setting resource limits.

Major changes between version 1.7.6b2 and 1.7.6b3:

The sudoers parser now treats a newline in the middle of a double quoted string as an error unless a line continuation character was used. Previously, the text between the double quote and the newline was discarded.
Fixed a potential crash when a non-regular file (e.g. a directory) is present in an includedir.
A uid or gid is now allowed in per-user and per-runas Defaults entries.
The sudoers parser now returns an error when an empty string is found where a word was expected.
Fixed printing of ALL in an Alias in testsudoers.

Major changes between version 1.7.6b1 and 1.7.6b2:

Whitespace is now allowed after the modifier in a Defaults entry. E.g. Defaults: username set_home
The sudoers parser now returns an error for a Defaults line that comes immediately after a line continuation character.

Major changes between version 1.7.5 and 1.7.6b1:

A new LDAP setting, sudoers_search_filter, has been added to ldap.conf. This setting can be used to restrict the set of records returned by the LDAP query. Based on changes from Matthew Thomas.
White space is now permitted within a User_List when used in conjunction with a per-user Defaults definition.
Support for double-quoted words in the sudoers file has been fixed. The change in 1.7.5 for escaping the double quote character caused the double quoting to only be available at the beginning of an entry.
The fix for resuming a suspended shell in 1.7.5 caused problems with resuming non-shells on Linux. Sudo will now save the process group ID of the program it is running on suspend and restore it when resuming, which fixes both problems.
A bug that could result in corrupted output in "sudo -l" has been fixed.