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Documenting commands # or $ before sudo? (feditown.com)
submitted 1 year ago by exu@feditown.com to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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This might be a stupid question, but hear me out.
I regularly document steps to install various software for myself on my wiki
More recently, I managed to use different custom text in the source markdown to prepend # and $ automatically, so commands can be copied more easily while still clarifying if it should be run as a normal user or as root.

Run command as user

$ some cool command

Run command as root/superuser with sudo

# some dangerous command

I usually remove and sudo and use the # prefix. However, in some cases, the sudo actually does something different that needs to be highlighted. For example, I might use it to execute a command as the user www-data

sudo -u www-data cp /var/www/html/html1 /var/www/html/html2

I often use $ as a prefix, but # would also make sense.
How would you prefix that line?

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[-] 418teapot@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

I seem to be in the minority here but I personally prefer using $ and # to denote root. I like this because not everyone uses sudo and might not even have it installed.

That being said, if you already have other commands that are using sudo -u ... to run commands as a different user then it might be best to just be consistent and prefix everything with it, but if there is only a few of those maybe a # cp foo bar && chown www-data bar is an alternative.

[-] exu@feditown.com 2 points 1 year ago

Yeah, being consistent is definitely important. I can avoid sudo in many cases, but there are other pages where half the commands need to be executed as some user.
My Nextcloud page has that problem where php scripts need to be executed by the right user. But it also contains the installation instructions and there I can avoid using sudo. It's like a 50/50 split between using # and sudo -u on that page :/

this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2023
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