I never had problems with permission again after I know the real power of sudo

sudo chmod -R 777 /
- It's safe because it's sudo! Like sudo rm -rf /*
- You won’t be able to do certain things. Either .ssh or ~ expects certain exact permissions and pukes if it’s different, IIRC
  
  Yep. I fucked up once when I meant to type chmod for something but with "./" but I missed the ".". It was not good.
- utter nonsense of the deranged
  
  It's my computer, I'll read and write what I want

sudo = shut up dammit, obey!
- personally, I prefer the good ol double bang (!!), but whatever floats yer boat, and all that.
  
  There are many people who appreciate a double bang.
  
  I mean if you double bang me I'm likely to do whatever you want, too.

A fellow nano user! There are dozens of us!
- One of us! One of us!
  
  Yeah, there is only one of you.
  
  Gooble gobble
- Its lighter weight than vim
  
  ed
- Hell yeah gotta embrace the pain of using archaic key bindings that you'll forget until the next time you need to edit a file in the terminal, you must suffer like man. Modem and sane terminal editors are for pussies! If it doesn't load in 0.01 ms it's bloated.. Whatever you do don't install anything like micro, just keep suffering!
- pico gang rise up!
  
  G T F O !
  -nano4lifegang
- Personally I am of the nonanoist denomination. I will curse all the demons of hell when on a new system I type vipw or systemctl edit some.service and I am unexpectedly faced with the demon called nano. Words cannot describe how much I loathe this pityful excuse for an editor, this usurper of editing powers, this illegitimate occupier of the editor symlink. How dare you insult me, the omnipotent god called root, by presenting me with a training tool for novices?!
  Fortunately, there are ancient spells that can nullify its powers. 'I command you: be gone Satan', I will utter under my breath as I carefully type in the magic incantation to cast it back into the fiery chasm from whence it came:
  
  apt -y purge nano

why tho?
If it's a file I have to modify once why would I run:
sudo chmod 774 file.conf
sudo chown myuser:myuser file.conf
vi file.conf
sudo chown root:root file.conf
sudo chmod 644 file.conf
instead of:
sudo vi file.conf
- Inane. Intentionally convoluted, or someone following the absolute worst tutorials without bothering to understand anything about what they're reading.
  I have questions:
  Why are your configurations world readable?
  Why are you setting the executable bit on a .conf file?
  Why change the files group alongside the owner when you've just given the owner rxw and you're going to set it back?
  If it was 644 before, why 774?
  Why even change the mode if you're going to change the ownership?
  Why do you want roots vimrc instead of your users
  Why do you hate sudoedit
  Why go out of your way to make this appear more convoluted than it actually is?
  Even jokey comments can lead to people copying bad habits if it's not clear they're jokes.
  This was a joke right? I was baited by your trolling?
  
  I felt kinda bad doing that at first. then your absolute rage made my doubt's melt away.
  
  Anger, rage and ultimately hate
  These are the emotions we feel sometimes

Getting flashbacks of me trying to explain to a mac user why using sudo "to make it work" is why he had a growing problem of needing to use sudo... (more and more files owned by root in his home folder).
- Sounds like a problem fixing itself, at some point MacOS is going to have problems if it can't edit a config is my guess.

You mean sudoedit right? Right?
edit: While there's a little bit of attention on this I also want to beg you to stop doing sudo su - and start doing sudo -i you know who you are <3
- Why memorize a different command? I assume sudoedit just looks up the system's EDITOR environment variable and uses that. Is there any other benefit?
  
  Why memorize a different command? I assume sudoedit just looks up the system’s EDITOR environment variable and uses that. Is there any other benefit?
  I don't use it, but, sudoedit is a little more complicated than that.
  
  tldr: it makes a copy of the file-to-be-edited in a temp directory, owned by you, and then runs your $EDITOR as your normal user (so, with your normal editor config)
  note that sudo also includes a similar command which is specifically for editing /etc/sudoers, called visudo 🤪
  
  It doesn't edit the file directly, it creates a temp file that replaces the file when saving. It means that the editor is run as the user, not as root.
  
  I know this is a meme community, but a modicum of effort IS warranted IMO. https://superuser.com/questions/785187/sudoedit-why-use-it-over-sudo-vi is the top result of a search for "why use sudoedit" and a pretty good answer. "man sudoedit" also explains it pretty well, as shown by another commenter.
  
  From the arch wiki
  
  sudo -e {file}
  Set SUDO_EDITOR in your profile to the editor of your choice, benefit is it retains your user profile for that editor, it's also less to type. For stuff like editing sudoers you're supposed to use visudo to edit that. Others can probably give better/more thorough reasons to consider it.
  
  Correct but it uses the SUDO_EDITOR environment variable. The benefit is more security while editing system files, it creates a temporary file and when you finish it writes changes to the original. There is more to it but that is all I know, it prevents some exploits.

Sorry, user babe is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported
- All incidents are reported directly to Stallman.
  
  Torvalds would like to have a word with you

If your file is not in your home directory, you shouldn't do chmod or chown in any other file
- What if I make my home /

sudo dolphin
Then I act like a Windows user and go there via the GUI because I didn't feel like learning how to use nano.
- If you're running dolphin as sudo and open like a text file in an editor, does it edit the file with sudo?
  
  When you run a process under sudo, it will be running as the root user. Processes that that process launches will also be running as the root user; new processes run as the same user as their parent process.
  So internally, no, it won't result in another invocation of sudo. But those processes a dolphin process running as root starts will be running as the root user, same as if you had individually invoked them via sudo.
- Does it let you do that?
  Also it may fail to connect to the compositor
- Try installing micro, it's a 21st century terminal editor
- Just log in as root lol
- Add admin:// in Dolphin (so /etc/sudoers.conf.d/ turns into admin:///etc/sudoers.conf.d/)

You meant sudo vim, ok?
(disclaimer: joke. Let the unholy war start)
- Do people really war over nano vs vi?
  I get the vi vs emacs war, but are people really willing to die on a hill over nano?
  
  Some guys at my company actually do ;)
  We have nano on our servers, but not vim
- Great one. Many thanks!
- eww.
  neovim is better.
  
  LOL, gtfo with that nonsense!
- I think you mean sudoedit file
- hmmm... looks like emacs doesn't have a lemmy extension yet.

as a GUI pleb i just doubleclick the file, which opens kate.
i edit the file and click save, get asked for my password
and all is fine.
- that's way too simple, the linux gods demand more esoteric suffering
- How dare you use computers to do stuff the way they were invented for?

now i feel shame. I used to love breaking my xorg.conf in nano

:w !sudo tee %

Why does it have to be transcribed into numbers anyway?
- Doesn't have to. You can also do something like
  chmod +rw ./filename

If it’s all my system should I really care about chown and chmod? Is the point that automatic processes with user names like www-data have to make edits, and need permission to do so, and that’s it?
Newish Linux user btw
- Short answer: yes.
  One of the tenets of security is that a user or process should have only enough access to do what it needs, and then no more. So your web server, your user account, to your mail server, should have exactly what they need, and usually that's been intricately planned by the distro.
  If you subvert it you could be writing files as root that www-data now can't read or write. This kind of error is sometimes obvious and sometimes very subtle.
  Especially if you're new to this different access model, tread carefully.
  Great news! If you need it up, many distros are really great at allowing you cm to compare permissions and reset them. The bad news is that maybe you're not on one of those. But you could be okay.
  
  Thanks for the explanation!
- In addition to corsicanguppy's comment, some — often important — programs actually expect the system to be secured in a particular way and will refuse to function if things don't look right.
  Now, you'd be right to expect that closing down permissions too tightly could break a system, but people have actually broken their systems by setting permissions too openly on the wrong things as well.
  That said, for general, everyday use, those commands don't need to be used much, and there might even be a way to do what they do from your chosen GUI. Even so, it nice to know they're there and what they do for those rare occasions when they might be needed.

I'm not sure if that's the joke and it flew over my head but isn't editing with sudo what you should be doing anyway if it's a system level file? You shouldn't change permissions unless the file is actually supposed to be owned by your user.
- You are supposed to run sudoedit.
  This command creates a temporary copy, opens it in you editor of choice and overwrites the protected file when the temp file changes.
  That way the editor doesn't run as root.
  You can see the difference if you run shell command, like whoami, in vim.

Total noob. Any experienced user knows it's

run0 micro file.txt
- How dare you using a 21st century terminal editor that keeps you sane? You're supposed to learn a whole new set of archaic key bindings! And suffer!

This is definitely the way for configuration files that you shouldn't change permissions or ownership on but only want to modify a few times.
However, I find chmod easier to use without reference by using the ugoa (+/-) rwxXst syntax rather than the numbers.

vi

What happened with frog_brawler?

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