Documenting commands # or $ before sudo?

exu@feditown.com to Linux@lemmy.ml – 18 points –

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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Edit: looks like this is wrong lol, that's what I get for not verifying. So maybe $ does make more sense!

Original message:

I think I'd go with #.

The non-root user probably doesn't have permission to run the sudo command as www-data user, but root does.

Unless you previously set permissions for the non-root user to sudo as www-data.

The non-root user probably doesn’t have permission to run the sudo command as www-data user, but root does.

You are wrong. E. g. in Debian (and Ubuntu) the default sudoers file contains

%sudo   ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL

that means that any user in the sudo group is permitted to execute any command as any other user. The same for redhat/fedora, but the group name is wheel there.

lol thanks for the correction