Examples of privileged commands

You would find most of the commands that require root privileges in the directories /sbin and /usr/sbin. Let’s switch to user smurf:

elliot@ubuntu-linux:~$ su - smurf 
Password:
smurf@ubuntu-linux:~$

Now let’s see if smurf can add a new user to the system:

smurf@ubuntu-linux:~$ useradd bob 
useradd: Permission denied.

User smurf gets a permission denied error. That’s because the useradd command is a privileged command. OK fine! Let’s try installing the terminator package, which is a pretty cool Terminal emulator I must say:

smurf@ubuntu-linux:~$ apt-get install terminator
E: Could not open lock file /var/lib/dpkg/lock-frontend - open
 (13: Permission denied)
E: Unable to acquire the dpkg frontend lock (/var/lib/dpkg/lock-frontend), 
are you root?

Again! User smurf is getting an error. Life is not fun without root, I hear you saying.