You should never edit this file with a normal text editor but always use the visudo command instead. If you have not assigned additional privileges to any user yet, you will need to be logged in as root to access this command # visudo To give users access to the sudo command, we need to use the visudo command to edit /etc/sudoers file. Add user for sudo access in /etc/sudoers file Once you are authenticated, a timestamp will be set and you can execute sudo command without password for a short period of time (5 minutes by default) after which the timestamp get reset. It will ask for the password to enter (user sam’s password and not root password). That is, if sudo access is provided to the user sam, he can list the files under the protected folder /root as follows. When you have a new user on your system, you need to decide if this user should be able to perform administrative tasks with sudo. If the new user will be a primary user on the system, you usually want to enable sudo privileges so that you can do routine configuration and maintenance. The /etc/sudoers file controls who can run what commands as what users on what machines and can also control special things such as whether you need a password for particular commands. What is the sudoers file and how sudo command works? There are basically no restrictions on what you can do to your system. Once the sudo access is given to a specific user in sudoers file, that user can execute the commands as root by executing it using the prefix sudo. This user has full system access and should be used only for administrative tasks.

Sudo access allows a user to execute all permitted commands as root or as any other user.

Add user to sudoers