As with many other Unix-like systems that have a BSD interface, OS X includes a fully Unix-compliant terminal that can be accessed with a Unix shell in the included Terminal utility. This feature allows for a relatively powerful way to access and modify system settings to customize and troubleshoot the system.
As with the rest of the system, this command-line interface is by default limited by standard permissions restrictions so only administrators may access system files and only users may access their own files. To get around this, the sudo command is commonly invoked to execute commands as another user, primarily the root user of the system.
When using this command, if you enter it once, then you will be prompted for a password; however, subsequent uses will not require a password, at least if you keep on using the sudo command. This happens because by default every use of sudo will create or update a time stamp file in the /var/db/sudo directory from which it will gauge a time-out period. If this period expires then sudo will require you supply another password before it updates the time stamp again.
This behavior is convenient when you are making multiple edits to the system; by default the time-out period is around 10-15 minutes so it can be used repeatedly within this timeframe without requiring you always supply your password.
While in most cases the default time-out period is acceptable, it does pose a potential security issu... [Read more]
by Topher Kessler via CNET
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