Development Release

The current development release of sudo is 1.9.12rc3.

Binary packages are also available for development releases.

For full details see the ChangeLog file or view the commit history via mercurial or GitHub.

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.

• Fixed a bug where sudo -l output included a carriage return after the newline. This is only needed when displaying to a terminal in raw mode. Bug #1042.

• Fixed a bug that prevented event log data from being sent to the log server when I/O logging was not enabled. This only affected systems without PAM or configurations where the pam_session and pam_setcred options were disabled in the sudoers file.

• The embedded copy of zlib has been updated to version 1.2.13.

• Updated translations from translationproject.org.

• The sesh helper program now uses getopt_long(3) to parse the command line options.

• Regenerated the gettext message catalogs.

• Fixed a bug in the ptrace-based intercept mode where the current working directory could include garbage at the end.

• Fixed a compilation error on systems that lack the stdint.h header. Bug #1035.

• Fixed a bug when logging the command’s exit status in intercept mode. The wrong command could be logged with the exit status.

• For ptrace-based intercept mode, sudo will now attempt to verify that the command path name, arguments and environment have not changed from the time when they were authorized by the security policy. The new intercept_verify sudoers setting can be used to control this behavior.

• Fixed running commands with a relative path (e.g. ./foo) in intercept mode. Previously, this would fail if sudo’s current working directory was different from that of the command.

• Sudo now supports passing the execve(2) system call the NULL pointer for the argv and/or envp arguments when in intercept mode. Linux treats a NULL pointer like an empty array.

• The sudoers LDAP schema now allows sudoUser, sudoRunasUser and sudoRunasGroup to include UTF-8 characters, not just 7-bit ASCII.

• Fixed a problem with sudo -i on SELinux when the target user’s home directory is not searchable by sudo. GitHub issue #160.

• Neovim has been added to the list of visudo editors that support passing the line number on the command line.

• Fixed a bug in sudo’s SHA384 and SHA512 message digest padding.

• Added a new -N (no-update) command line option to sudo which can be used to prevent sudo from updating the user’s cached credentials. It is now possible to determine whether or not a user’s cached credentials are currently valid by running:

    $ sudo -Nnv

and checking the exit value. One use case for this is to indicate in a shell prompt that sudo is “active” for the user.

• PAM approval modules are no longer invoked when running sub-commands in intercept mode unless the intercept_authenticate option is set. There is a substantial performance penalty for calling into PAM for each command run. PAM approval modules are still called for the initial command.

• Intercept mode on Linux now uses process_vm_readv(2) and process_vm_writev(2) if available.

• The XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP environment variable is now preserved by default. This makes it possible for graphical applications to choose the correct theme when run via sudo.

• On 64-bit systems, if sudo fails to load a sudoers group plugin, it will use system-specific heuristics to try to locate a 64-bit version of the plugin.

• The cvtsudoers manual now documents the JSON and CSV output formats. GitHub issue #172.

• Fixed a bug where sub-commands were not being logged to a remote log server when log_subcmds was enabled. GitHub issue #174.

• The new log_stdin, log_stdout, log_stderr, log_ttyin, and log_ttyout sudoers settings can be used to support more fine-grained I/O logging. The sudo front-end no longer allocates a pseudo-terminal when running a command if the I/O logging plugin requests logging of stdin, stdout, or stderr but not terminal input/output.

• Quieted a libgcrypt run-time initialization warning. This fixes Debian bug #1019428 and Ubuntu bug #1397663.

• Fixed a bug in visudo that caused literal backslashes to be removed from the EDITOR environment variable. GitHub issue #179.

• The sudo Python plugin now implements the find_spec method instead of the the deprecated find_module. This fixes a test failure when a newer version of setuptools that doesn’t include find_module is found on the system.

• Fixed a bug introduced in sudo 1.9.9 where sudo_logsrvd created the process ID file, usually /var/run/sudo/sudo_logsrvd.pid, as a directory instead of a plain file. The same bug could result in I/O log directories that end in six or more X’s being created literally in addition to the name being used as a template for the mkdtemp(3) function.

• Fixed a long-standing bug where a sudoers rule with a command line argument of “”, which indicates the command may be run with no arguments, would also match a literal "" on the command line. GitHub issue #182.

• Added the -I option to visudo which only edits the main sudoers file. Include files are not edited unless a syntax error is found.

• Fixed sudo -l -U otheruser output when the runas list is empty. Previously, sudo would list the invoking user instead of the list user. GitHub issue #183.

• Fixed the display of command tags and options in sudo -l output when the RunAs user or group changes. A new line is started for RunAs changes which means we need to display the command tags and options again. GitHub issue #184.