Linux terminal change to root

How to run Terminal as root?

When we want to run a programs as root we use sudo , gksu , gksudo and etc. Now my question is how do we can run a Terminal as the root user in Terminal? I tried with using gksudo terminal and gksu terminal but nothing happens. and by running sudo terminal I get error sudo: terminal: command not found .

Is there really any advantage to running the terminal program itself as root? why not just start an interactive root shell inside the terminal with sudo -i ?

@Guru sudo shouldn’t be used to run graphical programs like this. If gksu / gksudo isn’t (or might not be) installed, sudo -H . (or sudo -i . ) can be used to run a graphical application . as root.

7 Answers 7

The default terminal emulator on Ubuntu is the GNOME Terminal. It’s located at /usr/bin/gnome-terminal and can be run with the gnome-terminal command.

What You Really Want

What you probably want is a shell running as root, as though it were produced from a root login (for example, with all the environment variables set for root rather than for your user).

Assuming that’s what you want, as steeldriver has suggested, just run:

You’ll have a root shell in which commands you enter will be run as root (without having to precede them with sudo ).

But if you really want to run the graphical terminal emulator application as root, read on. I present two ways: with gksu / gksdo , and with the sudo command.

With gksu / gksudo

Since you have the gksu package installed, you can run gnome-terminal as root with either of:

(Since gksu is set to sudo-mode in Ubuntu by default, these should be equivalent.)

Running gnome-terminal as root without a controlling non-root terminal:

Virtually every desktop environment provides a facility to run a command without having to open a terminal (which would then, if closed, usually cause the command to be terminated).

This is usually achieved with Alt + F2 . A textbox labeled Run command (or similar) will appear and you can enter your command.

For example, it looks like this in Unity:

And like this in MATE (GNOME Flashback/Fallback, Xfce, LXDE are similar):

Note that this works with gksu and gksudo because they use a graphical authentication dialog. If you were to press Alt + F2 and run sudo . , you would then be unable to interact with the password prompt.

With sudo

If you don’t have the gksu package and you won’t want to install it, you can use:

The -H flag is important because it sets the HOME environment variable to /root instead of your own user’s home directory. You should not use sudo gnome-terminal as it can break the gnome-terminal configuration belonging to the non-root user. For more information about this, see:

( sudo -i gnome-terminal is also okay.)

Getting rid of the controlling non-root terminal:

If you (1) open a graphical terminal, (2) run something like sudo -H gnome-terminal in it, to create a new graphical root terminal, and (3) quit the original non-root graphical terminal . then the root graphical terminal quits as well.

This is because the root graphical terminal is sent SIGHUP when the terminal that owns it is exited.

To prevent this, you might think you could instead launch the graphical root terminal with:

sudo -H gnome-terminal &

But this will only work if sudo doesn’t have to prompt for a password. If it does, you won’t see the password prompt.

One way to work around this is to use:

sudo -v sudo -H gnome-terminal 

sudo -v exists for just this purpose. As explained in man sudo , it «update[s] the user’s cached credentials, authenticating the user if necessary.»

Note that this will still not work if run directly from your desktop environment’s Alt + F2 «run command» box, because you still need a terminal to enter your password for sudo -v .

Or you can do it in what might be called the traditional way, by suspending the job after it starts:

1. Run sudo -H gnome-terminal from the original non-root graphical terminal.
2. Enter your password as prompted by sudo . The graphical terminal will start.
3. Still in the non-root terminal, press Ctrl + Z to suspend the root terminal. While the root terminal is suspended, you can’t use it; its interface will not respond to your actions.
4. Quit the controlling non-root terminal with exit . The graphical root terminal job will be both unsuspended and disowned by the non-root terminal, automatically.

sudo -H gnome-terminal ^Z exit 

But suppose you wanted to keep using the original, non-root terminal too. Then you could run bg N , where N is the graphical root terminal’s job number, to resume the job in the background. You can run jobs to find N but you probably won’t have to—that number was shown as [N] when you pressed Ctrl + Z . For example:

ek@Ilex:~$ sudo -H gnome-terminal [sudo] password for ek: ^Z [1]+ Stopped sudo -H gnome-terminal ek@Ilex:~$

gksudo gnome-terminal (assuming gksu is installed) 

No need to explain that you can use this to open any terminal as root like this; like Vala ( gksudo vala-terminal ), Xterm ( gksudo xterm ), Termit ( gksudo termit ), UXTerm ( gksudo uxterm ), Konsole ( gksudo konsole ) and so on.

@KasiyA You should still use gksu x-terminal-emulator , gksudo x-terminal-emulator , kdesudo x-terminal-emulator (if your desktop environment is KDE), sudo -H x-terminal-emulator , or sudo -i x-terminal-emulator instead, to avoid that problem. Similarly, sudo gedit should not be used to run gedit as root.

As previously stated, you ask how to run Terminal as root, but more likely you actually want to run the graphical Terminal application as your normal user, and start a root shell inside it where you are logged on as root. In this way the graphical terminal application is not granted root privileges. The previous answers don’t seem to give clear command lines to use so here’s what I use.

With xterm

xterm -bg black -fg red -e sudo -i

The ‘-e sudo -i’ tells xterm to switch to root in the session, and the colours are just to make it very obvious that it’s a root shell.

With Gnome Terminal

Personally, I bind Gnome keybindings to launch terminals easily

Go to Keyboard settings, add a custom shortcut with Shortcut Super+X and command ‘xterm -bg black -fg white -sb -sl 5000’, and root xterm with Shortcut Super+Z and command ‘xterm -bg black -fg red -sb -sl 5000 -e sudo -i’.

In the past I have tended to prefer xterm over Gnome Terminal because the font is small and simple, but I’m coming round to Terminal now I run high DPI big screens. Colour coding your terminals is a very good idea once you start to run different profiles with dangerous consequences to avoid accidents (e.g. local root, remote client’s machine, remote client root).

Yes this is exactly what I want to do: «run the graphical Terminal application as your normal user, and start a root shell inside it » I want to run one application as if it was preceded with sudo. I’m starting about 10 programs each in their own terminal, and each requires sudo. I’m using commands like this in the main script: gnome-terminal —title=»airmon» — bash -c ‘sudo airodump-ng wlan0mon —gpsd -C 1 -w $NOW-wlan0_airmon.pcap; $SHELL’ This works, but I have to type my password into all 10 terminals before they start.

If I precede the launch script with sudo sudo ./tenterms.sh , it fails with # Failed to parse arguments: Cannot open display: . I don’t understand your syntax of gnome-terminal — sudo -i with the current gnome-terminal «— » terminates options and starts the command.

@tim11g Regarding your need to type in ‘your password’ (I presume you mean the root password) into each shell, do you know about the /etc/sudoers file? For your second comment, it seems you need to learn about the — command line characters, perhaps you need something like gnome-terminal — sudo -i ./tenterms.sh . From the name, temterms.sh is going to launch 10 terminal applications, so if you run that as root then each terminal will run as root, which isn’t what you are trying to achieve.

That question sounds so simple that there must be a simple solution, right?
Of course you can use gksudo or similar tools but there may be environments where you don’t want to depend on GTK. It’s confusing but a terminal is not a shell !

The terminal is that thing what shows you stuff, where the shell is the thing that has those fancy features like environment variables, conditionals and all that scripting stuff. That’s why x-terminal-emulator -e . just expects a program to run. No scripts possible here, it just starts a new process. When a terminal starts it just knows that there’s some kind of screen showing you stuff and the input of your keyboard which pours directly in there. A shell delivers all the logic of a script language like eg. sh, bash, ash, zsh, .

The other important distinction is who is running the terminal and what shell is running inside it. You may run a terminal in the context of an ordinary user which runs a root shell inside of it but this has some disadvantages eg. when you start a new tab a new shell is spawned but it falls back to the privileges of an ordinary user. Your command of a ‘New shell please’ goes to the terminal and not the shell!
A disappointment when you realize that you have to enter all those sudo stuff once again for every tab you open. Now, is there a way to open a terminal and not a shell as root without using packages like gksudo? Expecting a debian context:

bash -c «xhost +si:localuser:root; ssh-askpass | sudo -S -Hb /usr/bin/xfce4-terminal —default-working-directory=/root»

Although it looks simple a lot stuff is happening here:

• allow root to access the X desktop of the current user.
• since sudo requires a tty, we avoid that by running ssh-askpass which runs in the context of the current user and asks for your pass.
• sudo now reads that pass from the stdin (-S), it set’s the home folder (-H) and spawns a new process detaching from our context (-b).
• and finally sets the terminal process’ default home folder to root to avoid landing in the home of the current user.

et voilà! You have a terminal running as root spawned in the context of the current user. Now when you spawn a new tab it’s happening inside the root terminal instead of the user who spawned it.

Attention! There’s is a reason why this stuff is so complicated. Keep in mind in whatever X|VNC|RDP session you are running it. It just keeps a terminal open. That’s the downside! If someone is able to capture your session (however likely it may be), root access is for free! Your decision.

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Changing from user to superuser

How do I change from user to superuser (root)? What command do I use in the Terminal to switch to root? I have tried —help but I get lost with all the listed help. I’m looking for a recent download/install so I can use it.

4 Answers 4

Launch an instance of your terminal (press CTRL + ALT + T or search for «terminal» in the Dash). This will give you your normal shell from which you can run commands or programmes without root access.

To get root access, you can use one of a variety of methods:

1. Run sudo and type in your login password, if prompted, to run only that instance of the command as root. Next time you run another or the same command without the sudo prefix, you will not have root access.
2. Run sudo -i . This will give you an interactive root shell. Note that the $ at the end of your prompt has changed to a # , indicating that you have root access. But you fall in the root home directory ( /root/ ). From here you can run any sequence of commands as root, or run the command exit to leave the root shell.
3. Use the su (substitute user) command to get a root shell. This is effectively the same as using sudo -i . Note that when you use this command it will ask for the root password and not your login password. These are not the same. You may have to set or change the root password by running sudo passwd root first.
4. Run sudo -s . This gives you root access, but maintains your current SHELL. Shell specific settings, including your current directory, are preserved. For instance if you use bash (Ubuntu’s default shell), aliases (and any other settings from ~/.bashrc ) are kept when you switch to the root user. To leave the root access, type exit as in the cases above.

Be advised that playing around with root access is dangerous, and if you had to ask about root access, you probably shouldn’t have the privilege. You have the potential to completely ruin your entire system with the mis-execution of many commands. Be careful and verify what you are doing before you do it. Google is Search engines are your friends.

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