Ben Halpern

Posted on Aug 27, 2019

How do you pronounce sudo?

#discuss #unix #linux #cli

Not necessarily how it's "supposed" to be pronounced, what do you say? (in your head or aloud)

How do you pronounce `sudo`?

soo-dough
soo-doo

Discuss: Were you ever taught this by anyone? Have you thought about this much?

P.S. Polls are still private admin features, but we'll make them general soon enough

Top comments (126)

Avalander • Aug 27 '19

Neither, I've aliased sudo to please.

Matt Moran • Aug 28 '19

I aliased it to fucking.

Muhammad Arslan Aslam • Oct 14 '19

In case you use zsh...

github.com/nvbn/thefuck

Rihan • Aug 27 '19

please remove recursively and force it irreversibly

Oleksii Filonenko • Aug 28 '19

Okay, we need a shell framework for rhyming command aliases.

Fulton Browne • Aug 27 '19

How did you do that?

Avalander • Aug 27 '19

I added this to my .bashrc file:

alias please='sudo'

Fulton Browne • Aug 27 '19

thx

Stephanie Handsteiner • Aug 27 '19 • Edited

alias please="sudo " in your .bash_profile

Adam Crockett 🌀 • Aug 28 '19

That's now on my to-do list 🥰

nadeeminamdar • Aug 29 '19

You mean "too-doo" or "too-dough", :-) ?

Ben Halpern • Aug 28 '19

I love this!

Jaime González García • Aug 27 '19

sudo as in s-u-d-o (Spanish pronunciation). It means literally "I sweat".

sudo rm -rf

I sweat as I remove all files from my file system

Nicolò Rebughini • Aug 28 '19

Came here expecting this, I'm satisfied with the internet once again.

Tiash • Aug 27 '19

In italian too 😂

Jason R Tibbetts • Aug 28 '19

Latin, too.

Alesis Manzano • Aug 27 '19

idem

Matteo Nunziati • Aug 28 '19

This

Henry Williams • Aug 28 '19

That's a good one 😂

🦄N B🛡 • May 14 '20

Necessito a usar eso con mi compañeros.

Benny Powers 🇮🇱🇨🇦 • Aug 27 '19

obligatory xkcd

Giuseppe Vetri • Aug 27 '19 • Edited

Sudo like sudowoodo

Andrew Reese • Aug 27 '19

SUDOWOODO shake shake shake shake shake shake

Arden de Raaij • Aug 27 '19

came here to post the same 💚

Giuseppe Vetri • Aug 27 '19

Sudowoodo is life 💚

Alex Pedro • Aug 31 '19

I was hoping to see this in the comments! :D

Stephen Chiang • Aug 28 '19

Man so did I! 😂

Cécile Lebleu • Aug 27 '19

ssu-ssu-ssudio

Fred Richards • Aug 27 '19

Phil Collins taught us long ago...

Yechiel Kalmenson • Aug 27 '19

I pronounce it as "please" 🤗

Katerina Borodina

@kathyra_

protip: alias sudo to "please" for a much more wholesome unix experience

07:16 AM - 12 Aug 2019

9730 25378

Ben Halpern • Aug 27 '19

That’s good 🙂

Sidhant Panda • Aug 27 '19

I've added the following alias

alias please='sudo $(fc -ln -1)'

So now,

~$ bash ./helloworld
bash: ./helloworld: permission denied
~$ please
Hello World!

Source twitter.com/zzaaho/status/11608251...

Martin Wallgren • Nov 27 '19

The previous command can be found in !!

alias please='sudo !!'

sgcdialler • Aug 28 '19

If only there were a way to change 'permission denied' to 'ask nicely'!

Muhammad Arslan Aslam • Sep 2 '19

I can say that I've successfully wasted an hour looking to see if this was possible!

Andrew Bone • Aug 27 '19

Sue Doe sounds like a lovely lady.

Dan Conn • Aug 27 '19

Sister of Jon though.

Lars Richter • Aug 29 '19

You are right. Would like to meet her some day. Somehow I think, I would do everything she tells me to do.

Chad Hudson • Aug 28 '19

That Sue Doe

Austin S. Hemmelgarn • Aug 27 '19

Habitually like the US English pronunciation of 'pseudo'.

When actually explaining the command to people though, I pronounce it as three syllables, spelling out the first two letters and pronouncing the last two just like the English word 'do', because that's how it breaks down as an acronym (short for 'Switch User and DO', derived from su for 'Switch User').

mARK bLOORE • Nov 15 '19

linux and MacOSX man su say "substitute user" (though "switch" seems to make more sense). but i'm pretty sure that in the old days it was "superuser", which is the default user to switch to.

Austin S. Hemmelgarn • Nov 16 '19

It's ambiguous in the original manual (page 17 of bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/man13.pdf, which is a scanned version of the original Version 1 UNIX manual), which does mention becoming 'super-user', but only once and not as the command name. I'm a bit too lazy to figure out when it changed from switching to UID 0 to being able to switch to any user, as that's likely to be the first place it's mentioned as switch or substitute.

All I've ever heard people say when talking about it is 'switch' though, probably because that's the mental flow for most people.

Anton T • Aug 27 '19

I thought it was short for "Super User Do"? 🤔

Austin S. Hemmelgarn • Aug 28 '19

I've heard people say that, but it's pretty well established that sudo is derived from the old UNIX su command, which is definitely 'switch user'. It just happens that both have the root user as the default user to when a specific user isn't specified and that's the common case, but there's nothing that prevents you from using it to switch to any user (and by default, the root user can use sudo to do so without needing a password).

Josef Strzibny • Aug 30 '19

No, it's not. It's from su command "switch user". Also check the man page that says "sudo, sudoedit — execute a command as another user".

Avalander • Aug 27 '19

Useful after a tough day

Smit Patel • Aug 28 '19

Is this reddit, yet?

David Brewer • Aug 28 '19

I've never aliased sudo but i always alias python to pythong because I can never type that right

Kasey Speakman • Aug 27 '19 • Edited

Pseudo. I always took it as being a pseudo-superuser if your user account has sudo permission. Also, the two vowels used are different so it feels more natural (to me) to use different sounds between the syllables. I heard it pronounced "pseudo" for years before I heard some random video on the internet pronounce it as "doo". I just took it as that person not knowing any better and felt bad for them. But I guess it is possible that my pronunciation has been wrong or that popular opinion can change what is "right". (Look at gif, where most of the internet disagrees with the creator of the format on pronunciation.)

The "please" meme is kinda funny, but in my mind it builds the wrong mental model of what sudo is for. It is a protection from making mistakes, a design feature to isolate user-level from system-level changes. Not courtesy. Well anyway, I guess there's nothing wrong with having fun with it as long as you know it's actual purpose.

Josef Strzibny • Aug 30 '19

No, it's not superuser actually. It's from su command "switch user". Also check the man page that says "sudo, sudoedit — execute a command as another user". That means not necessary superuser.

Kasey Speakman • Aug 30 '19 • Edited

You are right, the commands are named for "switch user" not "super user". However, I still think of it as pseudo superuser because that is the default user that you switch to with su or sudo and is the way I use it 99% of the time. And "psuedo" also resonates really well with sudo because you aren't fully switching to the other user to execute the command like you do with su. (Still shows up in original user's command history, etc.)

Kyle Boe • Aug 27 '19 • Edited

I use soo-doo because it is the compilation of the phonetics from the command's unabbreviated form:

superuser do

Jérôme Gamez • Aug 27 '19 • Edited

Non-native speaker here, asking just out of curiosity: if phonetic (assuming English) why isn’t that syou-doo ?🙈

Kyle Boe • Aug 27 '19

You're totally right. It should be:

superuser do

I just looked it up and "superuser" is one word. I'll correct my original post.

Also, as a native English speaker, I'm sorry the language is so weird.

Simon Massey • Aug 27 '19

Totally that is what we day ”syou-do” because it's superuser do.

Josef Strzibny • Aug 30 '19

No, it's not superuser do. It's from su command "switch user". Also check the man page that says "sudo, sudoedit — execute a command as another user".