Sudo Development Releases

Current Development Release

The current development release of sudo is 1.8.8rc1.
Binary packages are also available for the development releases.

For full details see the ChangeLog file or view the commit logs in mercurial.

If you plan to use a development release of sudo, please subscribe to the sudo-workers mailing list so that you will receive updates on bug fixes and related announcements. You may also be interested in the sudo-commits mailing list which receives a message for each commit to the sudo source tree.

Major changes between version 1.8.8rc1 and 1.8.8b3:

Updated translations from translationproject.org.
In sudoreplay's list mode the this qualifier now works a bit better. There is still a lot of room for improvment in the way relative dates are parsed.

Major changes between version 1.8.8b3 and 1.8.8b2:

Fixed a bug introduced in sudo 1.8.7 where the indexes written to the timing file were incorrect. Sudoreplay includes a work around for replaying files written by sudo 1.8.7.

Major changes between version 1.8.8b2 and 1.8.8b1:

French translation for sudo from translationproject.org.
Sudo's noexec support on Mac OS X 10.4 and above now uses dynamic symbol interposition instead of setting DYLD_FORCE_FLAT_NAMESPACE=1 which causes issues with some programs.
Fixed visudo's -q (--quiet) flag, broken in sudo 1.8.6.
Root may no longer change its SELinux role without entering a password.

Major changes between version 1.8.8b1 and 1.8.7:

Removed a warning on PAM systems with stacked auth modules where the first module on the stack does not succeed.
Sudo, sudoreplay and visudo now support GNU-style long options.
The -h (--host) option may now be used to specify a host name. This is currently only used by the sudoers plugin in conjunction with the -l (--list) option.
Program usage messages and manual SYNOPSIS sections have been simplified.
Sudo's LDAP SASL support now works properly with Kerberos. Previously, the SASL library was unable to locate the user's credential cache.
It is now possible to set the nproc resource limit to unlimited via pam_limits on Linux (bug #565).
New pam_service and pam_login_service sudoers options that can be used to specify the PAM service name to use.
New pam_session and pam_setcred sudoers options that can be used to disable PAM session and credential support.
The sudoers plugin now properly supports UIDs and GIDs that are larger than 0x7fffffff on 32-bit platforms.
Fixed a visudo bug introduced in sudo 1.8.7 where per-group Defaults entries would cause an internal error.
If the tty_tickets sudoers option is enabled (the default), but there is no tty present, sudo will now use a ticket file based on the parent process ID. This makes it possible to support the normal timeout behavior for the session.
Fixed a problem running commands that change their process group and then attempt to change the terminal settings when not running the command in a pseudo-terminal. Previously, the process would receive SIGTTOU since it was effectively a background process. Sudo will now grant the child the controlling tty and continue it when this happens.
The closefrom_override sudoers option may now be used in a command-specified Defaults entry (bug #610).
Sudo's BSM audit support now works on Solaris 11.
Brazilian Portuguese translation for sudo and sudoers from translationproject.org.

Major changes between version 1.8.7rc4 and 1.8.7rc3:

Sudo now only builds Position Independent Executables (PIE) by default on Linux systems and verifies that a trivial test program builds and runs.
On Solaris 11.1 and higher, sudo binaries will now have the ASLR tag enabled if supported by the linker.

Major changes between version 1.8.7rc3 and 1.8.7rc2:

Fixed a problem resolving the tty name on file systems that return DT_UNKNOWN for the d_type field in struct dirent.

Major changes between version 1.8.7rc2 and 1.8.7rc1:

Quiet a few -Wunused-result compiler warnings.
Position independent executables appear to be broken on FreeBSD/arm so imply --disable-pie on that platform.
Sudoers no longer stores the tty's ctime in the tty-specific time stamp file on Linux systems using devpts. In the past, the ctime never changed on devpts device nodes but newer Linux kernels follow POSIX and update the ctime.

Major changes between version 1.8.7rc1 and 1.8.7b3:

Updated translations and minor documentation tweaks.

Major changes between version 1.8.7b3 and 1.8.7b2:

The paths to ldap.conf and ldap.secret may now be specified in sudo.conf as arguments to the sudoers plugin.
When the process has no controlling tty, sudo no longer checks to see if the parent process has a tty. If the process has disassociated from its tty it is better to just treat the tty as "unknown".
Updated translations from translationproject.org.
Documentation updates.

Major changes between version 1.8.7b2 and 1.8.7b1:

New support for specifying a SHA-2 digest along with the command in sudoers. Supported hash types are sha224, sha256, sha384 and sha512. See the description of Digest_Spec in the sudoers manual or the description of sudoCommand in the sudoers.ldap manual for details.

Major changes between version 1.8.7b1 and 1.8.6p7:

The non-Unix group plugin is now supported when sudoers data is stored in LDAP.
Sudo now uses a workaround for a locale bug on Solaris 11.0 that prevents setuid programs like sudo from fully using locales.
User messages are now always displayed in the user's locale, even when the same message is being logged or mailed in a different locale.
Log files created by sudo now explicitly have the group set to group ID 0 rather than relying on BSD group semantics (which may not be the default).
A new exec_background sudoers option can be used to initially run the command without read access to the terminal when running a command in a pseudo-tty. If the command tries to read from the terminal it will be stopped by the kernel (via SIGTTIN or SIGTTOU) and sudo will immediately restart it as the forground process (if possible). This allows sudo to only pass terminal input to the program if the program actually is expecting it. Unfortunately, a few poorly-behaved programs (like "su" on most Linux systems) do not handle SIGTTIN and SIGTTOU properly.
Sudo now uses an efficient group query to get all the groups for a user instead of iterating over every record in the group database on HP-UX and Solaris.
Sudo now produces better error messages when there is an error in the sudo.conf file.
Two new settings have been added to sudo.conf to give the admin better control of how group database queries are performed. The group_source setting specifies how the group list for a user will be determined. Legal values are static (use the kernel groups list), dynamic (perform a group database query) and adaptive (only perform a group database query if the kernel list is full). The max_groups specifies the maximum number of groups a user may belong to when performing a group database query.
The sudo.conf file now supports line continuation by using a backslash as the last character on the line.
There is now a standalone sudo.conf manual page.
Sudo now stores its libexec files in a sudo subdirectory instead of in libexec itself. For backwards compatibility, if the plugin is not found in the default plugin directory, sudo will check the parent directory if the default directory ends in "/sudo".
The sudoers I/O logging plugin now logs the terminal size.
A new sudoers option maxseq can be used to limit the number of I/O log entries that are stored.
The system_group and group_file sudoers group provider plugins are now installed by default.
The list output (sudo -l) output from the sudoers plugin is now less ambiguous when an entry includes different runas users. The long list output (sudo -ll) for file-based sudoers is now more consistent with the format of LDAP-based sudoers.
A uid may now be used in the sudoRunAsUser attributes for LDAP sudoers.
Minor plugin API change: the close and version functions are now optional. If the policy plugin does not provide a close function and the command is not being run in a new pseudo-tty, sudo may now execute the command directly instead of in a child process.
A new sudoers option pam_session can be used to disable sudo's PAM session support.
On HP-UX systems, sudo will now use the pstat() function to determine the tty instead of ttyname().
Turkish translation for sudo from translationproject.org.
Dutch translation for sudo and sudoers from translationproject.org.
Tivoli Directory Server client libraries may now be used with HP-UX where libibmldap has a hidden dependency on libCsup.
The sudoers plugin will now ignore invalid domain names when checking netgroup membership. Some Linux systems use the string "(none)" for the NIS-style domain name instead of an empty string.

Major changes between version 1.8.6rc3 and 1.8.6rc2:

Use sig2str() to convert a signal number to a name if available.
Use fseeko() instead of fseek*() in legacy utmp handling if available.

Major changes between version 1.8.6rc2 and 1.8.6rc1:

Fixed a race condition that could cause sudo to receive SIGTTOU (and stop) when resuming a shell that was run via sudo when I/O logging (and use_pty) is not enabled.
Sending SIGTSTP directly to the sudo process will now suspend the running command when I/O logging (and use_pty) is not enabled.

Major changes between version 1.8.6rc1 and 1.8.6b4:

Fixed a crash introduced in 1.8.4b4 when the matching entry in sudoers lacks a Runas_Spec.
Visudo will now warn about unknown Defaults entries that are per-host, per-user, per-runas or per-command.
Updated translations from translationproject.org.
Avoid printing an error message in yyerror() if we are unable to open a file included by sudoers, the message is already displayed by open_sudoers().
Modified yyerror() so that tokenizer regress tests pass again.
The sudo manual page now contains a COMMAND EXECUTION section that describes how sudo runs the command, the extra sudo processes and signal handling.

Major changes between version 1.8.6b4 and 1.8.6b3:

New support for Solaris privilege sets. This makes it possible to specify fine-grained privileges in the sudoers file on Solaris 10 and above. A Runas_Spec that contains no Runas_Lists can be used to give a user the ability to run a command as themselves but with an expanded privilege set.
Fixed a problem with the reboot and shutdown commands on some systems (such as HP-UX and BSD). On these systems, reboot sends all processes (except itself) SIGTERM. When sudo received SIGTERM, it would relay it to the reboot process, thus killing reboot before it had a chance to actually reboot the system.
Support for using the System Security Services Daemon (SSSD) as a source of sudoers data.
Slovenian translation for sudo and sudoers from translationproject.org.

Major changes between version 1.8.6b3 and 1.8.6b2:

If a user fails to authenticate and the command would be rejected by sudoers, it is now logged with command not allowed instead of N incorrect password attempts. Likewise, the mail_no_perms sudoers option now takes precedence over mail_badpass
The sudo manuals are now formatted in mdoc. Versions using the legacy man macros are provided for systems that lack mdoc.

Major changes between version 1.8.6b2 and 1.8.6b1:

Worked around an issue with libtool removing the -fstack-protector flag when linking.
Sudo is now built as a position independent executable (PIE) if there is compiler and linker support for it. This may be disabled using the --disable-pie configure option.

Major changes between version 1.8.6b1 and 1.8.5p2:

Sudo is now built with the -fstack-protector flag if the the compiler supports it. Also, the -zrelro linker flag is used if supported. The --disable-hardening configure option can be used to build sudo without stack smashing support.
If the user is a member of the exempt group in sudoers, they will no longer be prompted for a password even if the -k flag is specified with the command. This makes sudo -k command consistent with the behavior one would get if the user ran sudo -k immediately before running the command.
The sudoers file may now be a symbolic link. Previously, sudo would refuse to read sudoers unless it was a regular file.
The sudoreplay command can now properly replay sessions where no tty was present.
The sudoers plugin now takes advantage of symbol visibility controls when supported by the compiler or linker. As a result, only a small number of symbols are exported which significantly reduces the chances of a conflict with other shared objects.
Improved support for the Tivoli Directory Server LDAP client libraries. This includes support for using LDAP over SSL (ldaps) as well as support for the BIND_TIMELIMIT, TLS_KEY and TLS_CIPHERS ldap.conf options. A new ldap.conf option, TLS_KEYPW can be used to specify a password to decrypt the key database.
When constructing a time filter for use with LDAP sudoNotBefore and sudoNotAfter attributes, the current time now includes tenths of a second. This fixes a problem with timed entries on Active Directory.

Major changes between version 1.8.5rc5 and 1.8.5rc4:

Fixed an alignment problem in the password caching on NetBSD platforms with strict aligment constraints.
Fixed a crash on Solaris SPARC when the signal handler is invoked with a NULL siginfo_t pointer.

Major changes between version 1.8.5rc4 and 1.8.5rc3:

Updated translations from translationproject.org
Implemented RTLD_DEFAULT, and RTLD_SELF and RTLD_NEXT emulation for HP-UX.
Added the system_group group provider plugin for people who need to look up groups by name rather than by group ID.

Major changes between version 1.8.5rc3 and 1.8.5rc2:

The policy plugin's init_session function is now called by the parent sudo process, not the child process that executes the command. This allows the PAM session to be open and closed in the same process, which some PAM modules require.
The PAM credentials set during PAM session setup are now deleted when the PAM session is closed.
Setting the SSL parameter to start_tls in ldap.conf now works properly when using Mozilla-based SDKs that support the ldap_start_tls_s() function.
The TLS_CHECKPEER parameter in ldap.conf now works when the Mozilla NSS crypto backend is used with OpenLDAP.

Major changes between version 1.8.5rc2 and 1.8.5rc1:

On Solaris, and possibly other SV4-derived systems, sudo now uses the minor() function prototyped in mkdev.h instead of the obsolete macro present in sysmacros.h.

Major changes between version 1.8.5rc1 and 1.8.5b8:

The Linux tty lookup code now uses the /proc/pid/stat file if possible.
New Croatian and Galician translations from translationproject.org
The process id, parent process id, process group id, session id and terminal process group id are now passed in to the plugin.

Major changes between version 1.8.5b8 and 1.8.5b7:

Check for SVR4-style struct psinfo.pr_ttydev and use that to determine the tty if stdin/stdout/stderr are not ttys.

Major changes between version 1.8.5b7 and 1.8.5b6:

Sudo now behaves better when select() fails due to the pty being revoked. An error of EIO (seen on older versions of Solaris) from select() is now treated the same as EBADF.
Sudo now opens devices in non-blocking mode when trying to determine the user's terminal.
Fixed the AIX-specific permission setting code.
The -k option may now be specified along with the -i or -s options.
Don't do tilde or brace expansion when glob() is in use. This matches the historic behavior when fnmatch() was used.
Fixed printing of the TSID field in sudoreplay -l output.
The process ID is now included in the debug file output.

Major changes between version 1.8.5b6 and 1.8.5b5:

Sudo now behaves properly on systems that send SIGTSTP before SIGHUP when the user's pty is revoked. This can happen when the window the session is running in is killed.

Major changes between version 1.8.5b5 and 1.8.5b4:

Sudo can now detect when a user has logged out and back in again on Solaris 11 when tty-based time stamps are in use.
When debugging is enabled, calls to warning() or error() will now log the error string to the debug file. The function, file and line number are also logger for warning(), warningx(), error() and errorx().
Fixed a bug where sudo would exit before calling the plugin close function when select() returns an error due to the terminal device being invalidated when the session is closed. This can happen when the window the session is running in is killed.

Major changes between version 1.8.5b4 and 1.8.5b3:

Add execvpe(), exect(), posix_spawn() and posix_spawnp() wrappers to sudo_noexec.c.
Fix compat setutxent and endutxent macros for systems with setutent() but not setutxent().

Major changes between version 1.8.5b3 and 1.8.5b2:

Updated the bundled zlib to version 1.2.6.
If the "timestampowner" user cannot be resolved, use ROOT_UID instead of exiting with a fatal error.
Fixed compiler warnings on some platforms.
Fix parsing of Path askpass and Path noexec in sudo.conf.
The cancel button on an askpass GUI program now exits the password prompt loop on PAM systems.
When initializing the environment for env_reset, start out with the contents of /etc/environment on AIX and login.conf on BSD.
Swedish sudo and sudoers translations from translationproject.org.

Major changes between version 1.8.5b2 and 1.8.5b1:

Fixed a potential double free exposed by changes in 1.8.5b1.

Major changes between version 1.8.5b1 and 1.8.4p4:

When noexec is enabled, sudo_noexec.so will now be prepended to any existing LD_PRELOAD variable instead of replacing it.
The user/group/mode checks on sudoers files have been relaxed. As long as the file is owned by the sudoers uid, not world-writable and not writable by a group other than the sudoers gid, the file is considered OK. Note that visudo will still set the mode to the value specified at configure time.
It is now possible to specify the sudoers path, uid, gid and file mode as options to the plugin in the sudo.conf file.
Lithuanian and Vietnamese translations from translationproject.org.
/etc/environment is no longer read directly on Linux systems when PAM is used. Sudo now merges the PAM environment into the user's environment which is typically set by the pam_env module.
The plugin API has been extended in three ways. First, options specified in sudo.conf after the plugin pathname are passed to the plugin's open function. Second, sudo has limited support for hooks that can be used by plugins. Currently, the hooks are limited to environment handling functions. Third, the init_session policy plugin function is passed a pointer to the user environment which can be updated during session setup. The plugin API version has been incremented to version 1.2. See the sudo_plugin manual for more information.

Major changes between version 1.8.4rc1 and 1.8.4rc2:

Fixed the sudoers permission check when the expected sudoers mode is owner-writable.
Better configure check for PAM headers and libraries.
New sudo Spanish translation from translationproject.org.
Normally, sudo disables core dumps while it is running. This behavior can now be modified at run time with a line in sudo.conf like Set disable_coredumps false.
The "noexec" functionality works once again on AIX 5.3 and above. A change in sudo 1.8.1p2 prevented it from working.
The sudo process on AIX will now show up in ps as being owned by root, not the invoking user.

Major changes between version 1.8.4b5 and 1.8.4rc1:

Fixed a problem with "sudo -g group" on FreeBSD where the kernel stores the effective gid as the first entry in the supplemental group list.
The NOEXEC option now works when an SELinux role is specified.
Fixed a race condition introduced in 1.8.4b1 when I/O logging is abled that resulted in the exit value to usually be 1 instead of the command's actual exit value.
Fixed a potential off-by-one when making a copy of the environment for LD_PRELOAD insertion.
sudo is now built with _FORTIFY_SOURCE enabled where supported.

Major changes between version 1.8.4b4 and 1.8.4b5:

"make check" will now only run the compat regress tests for compat objects we actually build and not test the system versions.
Fixed a regression introduced in 1.8.4b1 that caused a problem with pipelines when I/O logging is not enabled.

Major changes between version 1.8.4b3 and 1.8.4b4:

No longer prepend "/dev/" to the devicename if devname() returns a fully-qualified pathname. This should never happen.
The packages now include the parent directories in case they don't already exist. This fixes a directory permissions problem with the AIX package when the /usr/local directories don't already exist.

Major changes between version 1.8.4b2 and 1.8.4b3:

The full path to the controlling terminal is once again passed to the plugin on BSD systems. This was broken in sudo 1.8.3b2.
The output of "visudo -c" now lists any include files that were checked. Previously, only the main sudoers file was listed.

Major changes between version 1.8.4b1 and 1.8.4b2:

On BSD systems the controlling terminal is now determined via sysctl() when possible. This usually allows sudo to find the tty name even when standard input, output and error are redirected to /dev/null.
Fixed a compilation error on FreeBSD.
The testsudoers program now uses the debugging framework.
Updated Esperanto, Finnish, Polish and Ukrainian translations from translationproject.org.

Major changes between version 1.8.3p1 and 1.8.4b1:

The -D flag in sudo has been replaced with a more general debugging framework that is configured in sudo.conf.
Fixed a false positive in visudo strict mode when aliases are in use.
Fixed a crash with "sudo -i" when a runas group was specified without a runas user.
The line on which a syntax error is reported in the sudoers file is now more accurate. Previously it was often off by a line.
Fixed a bug where stack garbage could be printed at the end of the lecture when the "lecture_file" option was enabled.
"make install" now honors the LINGUAS environment variable.
The #include and #includedir directives in sudoers now support relative paths. If the path is not fully qualified it is expected to be located in the same directory of the sudoers file that is including it.
Serbian translation for sudo from translationproject.org.
LDAP-based sudoers may now access by group ID in addition to group name.
visudo will now fix the mode on the sudoers file even if no changes are made unless the -f option is specified.
The "use_loginclass" sudoers option works properly again.
On systems that use login.conf, "sudo -i" now sets environment variables based on login.conf.
For LDAP-based sudoers, values in the search expression are now escaped as per RFC 4515.
The plugin close function is now properly called when a login session is killed (as opposed to the actual command being killed). This can happen when an ssh session is disconnected or the terminal window is closed.
The deprecated "noexec_file" sudoers option is no longer supported.
Fixed a race condition when I/O logging is not enabled that could result in tty-generated signals (e.g. control-C) being received by the command twice.
If none of the standard input, output or error are connected to a tty device, sudo will now check its parent's standard input, output or error for the tty name on systems with /proc. This allow tty-based tickets to work properly even when, e.g. standard input, output and error are redirected to /dev/null.
Added the --enable-kerb5-instance configure option to allow people using Kerberos V authentication to specify a custom instance so the principal name can be, e.g. "username/sudo" similar to how ksu uses "username/root".
Fixed a bug where a pattern like "/usr/*" included /usr/bin/ in the results, which would be incorrectly be interpreted as if the sudoers file had specified a directory.

Major changes between version 1.8.3rc4 and 1.8.3rc5:

Added new Japanese translation from translationproject.org.
The LOGNAME, USER and USERNAME environment variables are preserved correctly again in sudoedit mode.
The group list is now reallocated correctly when the initial size guess is too small.

Major changes between version 1.8.3rc3 and 1.8.3rc4:

Sudo will now work correctly with LDAP-based sudoers using TLS or SSL on Debian systems.

Major changes between version 1.8.3rc2 and 1.8.3rc3:

A symbol conflict with the pam_ssh_agent_auth PAM module that would cause a crash been resolved.
The inability to load a group provider plugin is no longer a fatal error.
A potential crash in the utmp handling code has been fixed.
Two PAM session issues have been resolved. In previous versions of sudo, the PAM session was opened as one user and closed as another. Additionally, if no authentication was performed, the PAM session would never be closed.
Added new Italian translation from translationproject.org.

Major changes between version 1.8.3rc1 and 1.8.3rc2:

Added Italian translation for sudo from translationproject.org.
Updated TROUBLESHOOTING file to match the current state of things.
Fixes namespace collision that caused a crash with pam_ssh_agent_auth.
Fixed some warnings on FreeBSD.

Major changes between version 1.8.2 and 1.8.3rc1:

Fixed expansion of strftime() escape sequences in the log_dir sudoers setting.
Added new Esperanto translation from translationproject.org.
Sudo will now use PAM by default on AIX 6 and higher.
Added --enable-werror configure option for gcc's -Werror flag.
Visudo no longer assumes all editors support the +linenumber command line argument. It now uses a whitelist of editors known to support the option.
Fixed matching of network addresses when a netmask is specified but the address is not the first one in the CIDR block.
The configure script now check whether or not errno.h declares the errno variable. Previously, sudo would always declare errno itself for older systems that don't declare it in errno.h.
The NOPASSWD tag is now honored for denied commands too, which matches historic sudo behavior (prior to sudo 1.7.0).
Sudo now honors the DEREF setting in ldap.conf which controls how alias dereferencing is done during an LDAP search.

Major changes between version 1.8.1rc11 and 1.8.2rc12:

Fixed a problem with the AIX authentication support that could prevent a user from authenticating.

Major changes between version 1.8.1rc10 and 1.8.2rc11:

Regenerated configure with autoconf 2.68 and libtool 2.4.
Rename libsudoers convenience library to libparsesudoers to avoid libtool confusion.

Major changes between version 1.8.1rc9 and 1.8.2rc10:

New Danish sudoers translation from translationproject.org.
Updated Finish, Polish, Russian and Ukrainian translations from translationproject.org.
The runas_default setting in LDAP-enabled sudoers works correctly again when specified in a sudoRole other than defaults. This stopped working in sudo 1.7.0.

Major changes between version 1.8.1rc8 and 1.8.2rc9:

Added new Russian sudo translation and updated Chinese (simplified), Finish, Polish and Ukranian translations from translationproject.org.
The sudo front end now escapes the command args for "sudo -i" and "sudo -s" before calling the plugin instead of after. Otherwise, spaces in the command args cannot be handled properly. The sudoers plugin will unescape non- spaces to make matching easier.
Fixed some potential problems found by the clang static analyzer, none serious.

Major changes between version 1.8.1rc7 and 1.8.2rc8:

Updated Polish translation from translationproject.org.
Fixed a crash in the sudoers plugin when trying to run a command as a non-existent user if Linux audit support is enabled.
The fallback group matching code in sudoers is no longer needed and has been removed.
On Mac OS X, getgrouplist() is used by the sudo front-end to get the invoking user's group list instead of getgroups(). As a result, the sudoers plugin no longer needs to use mbr_check_membership() as group matching can be done by name instead.

Major changes between version 1.8.1rc6 and 1.8.2rc7:

New Polish translation from translationproject.org.
Several fixes have been made to the new group matching code in sudoers.
sudo -i command now works correctly with bash version 2.x at the expense of bash 1.x support.
Fixed an off-by-one error introduced in the new word wrap code for file logging.
RHEL 4 packages are no longer built with --with-pam-login since we don't ship an /etc/pam.d/sudo-i file for that release.
Fixed a build error when the --without-noexec configure option is specified.
The "noexec" feature is now disabled by default for AIX 4.x and lower; LDR_PRELOAD support is only available in AIX 5.3 and above.

Major changes between version 1.8.1rc5 and 1.8.2rc6:

When matching groups in the sudoers file, sudo will now match based on the name of the group instead of the group ID. This can substantially reduce the number of group lookups for sudoers files that contain a large nummber of groups.

Major changes between version 1.8.1rc4 and 1.8.2rc5:

sudo -i command now works correctly with the bash shell. Previously, the .bash_profile would not be sourced prior to running the command unless bash was built with NON_INTERACTIVE_LOGIN_SHELLS enabled. Many Linux distributions build bash with this option enabled.

Major changes between version 1.8.1rc3 and 1.8.2rc4:

The use_pty sudoers option is now correctly passed back to the sudo front end. This was missing in previous versions of sudo 1.8 which prevented use_pty from being honored.
New Danish translation and updated Chinese (simplified) translation from translationproject.org.

Major changes between version 1.8.1rc2 and 1.8.2rc3:

The SHELL environment variable is now preserved by default when sudo -s is run.
When installing /etc/sudoers via binary package on non-RPM and non-Debian systems, the owner and mode are now set explicitly in the postinstall script instead of relying on "cp -p". On AIX 6.1 at least, the postinstall script runs before permissions are set on files in the root part of the package.
Locale files are now removed by "make uninstall".
Added Basque translation from translationproject.org and updated Finish and Ukranian translations.
Plugins are now loaded with RTLD_GLOBAL instead of RTLD_LOCAL. This fixes problems with, e.g., PAM modules not having access to symbols provided by libpam on some platforms. Affects FreeBSD and SLES at least.

Major changes between version 1.8.1rc1 and 1.8.2rc2:

Sudo now includes NLS translations for Finish, Ukrainian and simplified Chinese.
I/O logging is now supported for commands run in background mode (using sudo's -b flag).
Visudo now checks the contents of an alias and warns about cycles when the alias is expanded.
If the user specifes a group via sudo's -g option that matches the target user's group in the password database, it is now allowed even if no groups are present in the Runas_Spec.

Major changes between version 1.8.1 and 1.8.2rc1:

Added a workaround for a FreeBSD bug with dlopen() and non-standard PAM modules.
Sudo, visudo, sudoreplay and the sudoers plug-in now have natural language support (NLS). Sudo will use gettext(), if available, to display translated messages. This can be disabled by passing configure the --disable-nls option.
Group ownership of the sudoers file is only enforced when the file mode on sudoers allows group readability or writability.
The sudo Makefiles now have more complete dependencies which are automatically generated instead of being maintained manually.

Major changes between version 1.8.1rc1 and 1.8.1rc3:

Sudo now parses command line arguments before loading any plugins. This allows "sudo -V" or "sudo -h" to work even if there is a problem with sudo.conf
Plugins are now linked with the static version of libgcc to allow the plugin to run on a system where no shared libgcc is installed, or where it is installed in a different location.
Fixed the fnmatch and glob regress tests on non-BSD systems.
Fixed and documented the --with-plugindir configure option.
If there is an error making one of the subdirectories, make will now exit with an error instead of continuing.
Fixed shell warnings when --without-skey, --without-opie, --without-kerb4, --without-kerb5 or --without-SecurID were specified.
Sudoers and visudo versions now include the sudoers grammar version.
LDFLAGS is now honored in the plugin Makefile.in files.

Major changes between version 1.8.1b4 and 1.8.1rc1:

Fixed a bug introduced in sudo 1.8.1b2 on systems without a native isblank() function that prevented Defaults lines from parsing correctly.

Major changes between version 1.8.1b3 and 1.8.1b4:

The %#gid syntax is now fully functional and documented.
Fixed a build problem on HP-UX.
If there is an existing sudoers file, verify that it parses properly before installing sudo via make install.
The testsudoers utility now supports runas groups and has more useful return values.
Fixed a crash when unrecognized escapes were used in an iolog file or dir.
Removed redundant AIX-specified code when setting resource limits.

Major changes between version 1.8.1b2 and 1.8.1b3:

The sudoers parser now treats a newline in the middle of a double quoted string as an error unless a line continuation character was used. Previously, the text between the double quote and the newline was discarded.
Fixed a potential crash when a non-regular file (e.g. a directory) is present in an includedir.
When the -V flag is specified, the main sudo version is now printed even if the policy plugin cannot be initialized.
A uid or gid is now allowed in per-user and per-runas Defaults entries.
The sudoers parser now returns an error when an empty string is found where a word was expected.
Fixed printing of ALL in an Alias in testsudoers.

Major changes between version 1.8.1b1 and 1.8.1b2:

Whitespace is now allowed after the modifier in a Defaults entry. E.g. Defaults: username set_home
The sudoers parser now returns an error for a Defaults line that comes immediately after a line continuation character.
Additional sudoers parser regression tests.

Major changes between version 1.8.0 and 1.8.1b1:

A new LDAP setting, sudoers_search_filter, has been added to ldap.conf. This setting can be used to restrict the set of records returned by the LDAP query. Based on changes from Matthew Thomas.
White space is now permitted within a User_List when used in conjunction with a per-user Defaults definition.
Support for double-quoted words in the sudoers file has been fixed. The change in 1.7.5 for escaping the double quote character caused the double quoting to only be available at the beginning of an entry.
The fix for resuming a suspended shell in 1.7.5 caused problems with resuming non-shells on Linux. Sudo will now save the process group ID of the program it is running on suspend and restore it when resuming, which fixes both problems.
A bug that could result in corrupted output in "sudo -l" has been fixed.
Sudo will now create an entry in the utmp (or utmpx) file when allocating a pseudo-tty (e.g. when logging I/O). The "set_utmp" and "utmp_runas" sudoers file options can be used to control this. Other policy plugins may use the "set_utmp" and "utmp_user" entries in the command_info list.
The sudoers policy now stores the TSID field in the logs even when the "iolog_file" sudoers option is defined to a value other than %{sessid}. Previously, the TSID field was only included in the log file when the "iolog_file" option was set to its default value.
The sudoreplay utility now supports arbitrary session IDs. Previously, it would only work with the base-36 session IDs that the sudoers plugin uses by default.
Sudo now passes "run_shell=true" to the policy plugin in the settings list when sudo's -s command line option is specified. The sudoers policy plugin uses this to implement the "set_home" sudoers option which was missing from sudo 1.8.0.
The "noexec" functionality has been moved out of the sudoers policy plugin and into the sudo front-end, which matches the behavior documented in the plugin writer's guide. As a result, the path to the noexec file is now specified in the sudo.conf file instead of the sudoers file.
On Solaris 10, the PRIV_PROC_EXEC privilege is now used to implement the "noexec" feature. Previously, this was implemented via the LD_PRELOAD environment variable.
The exit values for "sudo -l", "sudo -v" and "sudo -l command" have been fixed in the sudoers policy plugin.
The sudoers policy plugin now passes the login class, if any, back to the sudo front-end.
The sudoers policy plugin was not being linked with requisite libraries in certain configurations.

Major changes between version 1.7.10rc5 and 1.7.10rc4:

Fixed a race condition that could cause sudo to receive SIGTTOU (and stop) when resuming a shell that was run via sudo when I/O logging (and use_pty) is not enabled.
Sending SIGTSTP directly to the sudo process will now suspend the running command when I/O logging (and use_pty) is not enabled.

Major changes between version 1.7.10rc4 and 1.7.10rc3:

Avoid printing an error message in yyerror() if we are unable to open a file included by sudoers, the message is already displayed by open_sudoers().
The sudo manuals are now formatted in mdoc. Versions using the legacy man macros are provided for systems that lack mdoc.
If a user fails to authenticate and the command would be rejected by sudoers, it is now logged with command not allowed instead of N incorrect password attempts. Likewise, the mail_no_perms sudoers option now takes precedence over mail_badpass
The sudo manuals are now formatted in mdoc. Versions using the legacy man macros are provided for systems that lack mdoc.
The sudo manual page now contains a COMMAND EXECUTION section that describes how sudo runs the command, the extra sudo processes and signal handling.
Fixed a problem with the reboot and shutdown commands on some systems (such as HP-UX and BSD). On these systems, reboot sends all processes (except itself) SIGTERM. When sudo received SIGTERM, it would relay it to the reboot process, thus killing reboot before it had a chance to actually reboot the system.
When constructing a time filter for use with LDAP sudoNotBefore and sudoNotAfter attributes, the current time now includes tenths of a second. This fixes a problem with timed entries on Active Directory.

Major changes between version 1.7.10rc3 and 1.7.10rc2:

Sudo is now built as a position independent executable (PIE) if there is compiler and linker support for it. This may be disabled using the --disable-pie configure option.

Major changes between version 1.7.10rc2 and 1.7.10b1:

The sudoreplay command can now properly replay sessions where no tty was present.
The sudoers plugin now takes advantage of symbol visibility controls when supported by the compiler or linker. As a result, only a small number of symbols are exported which significantly reduces the chances of a conflict with other shared objects.
Improved support for the Tivoli Directory Server LDAP client libraries. This includes support for using LDAP over SSL (ldaps) as well as support for the BIND_TIMELIMIT, TLS_KEY and TLS_CIPHERS ldap.conf options. A new ldap.conf option, TLS_KEYPW can be used to specify a password to decrypt the key database.
Fixed a crash introduced in version 1.7.7 when "sudo -s" is specified with a command.

Major changes between version 1.7.10b1 and 1.7.9p1:

Sudo is now built with the -fstack-protector flag if the the compiler supports it. Also, the -zrelro linker flag is used if supported. The --disable-hardening configure option can be used to build sudo without stack smashing support.
If the user is a member of the exempt group in sudoers, they will no longer be prompted for a password even if the -k flag is specified with the command. This makes sudo -k command consistent with the behavior one would get if the user ran sudo -k immediately before running the command.
The sudoers file may now be a symbolic link. Previously, sudo would refuse to read sudoers unless it was a regular file.
The user/group/mode checks on sudoers files have been relaxed. As long as the file is owned by the sudoers uid, not world-writable and not writable by a group other than the sudoers gid, the file is considered OK. Note that visudo will still set the mode to the value specified at configure time.
/etc/environment is no longer read directly on Linux systems when PAM is used. Sudo now merges the PAM environment into the user's environment which is typically set by the pam_env module.
The initial evironment created when env_reset is in effect now includes the contents of /etc/environment on AIX systems and the "setenv" and "path" entries from /etc/login.conf on BSD systems.
On systems with an SVR4-style /proc file system, the /proc/pid/psinfo file is now uses to determine the controlling terminal, if possible. This allows tty-based tickets to work properly even when, e.g. standard input, output and error are redirected to /dev/null.
The output of "sudoreplay -l" is now sorted by file name (or sequence number). Previously, entries were displayed in the order in which they were found on the file system.
Sudo now behaves properly when I/O logging is enabled and the controlling terminal is revoked (e.g. the running sshd is killed). Previously, sudo may have exited without calling the I/O plugin's close function which can lead to an incomplete I/O log.
Sudo can now detect when a user has logged out and back in again on Solaris 11, just like it can on Solaris 10.
The built-in zlib included with Sudo has been upgraded to version 1.2.6.
Setting the SSL parameter to start_tls in ldap.conf now works properly when using Mozilla-based SDKs that support the ldap_start_tls_s() function.
The TLS_CHECKPEER parameter in ldap.conf now works when the Mozilla NSS crypto backend is used with OpenLDAP.

Major changes between version 1.7.9b2 and 1.7.9rc1:

Fixed a race condition introduced in 1.7.9b1 when I/O logging is abled that resulted in the exit value to usually be 1 instead of the command's actual exit value.
sudo is now built with _FORTIFY_SOURCE enabled where supported.

Major changes between version 1.7.9b1 and 1.7.9b2:

Fixed a regression introduced in 1.7.9b1 that caused a problem with pipelines when I/O logging is not enabled.
The packages now include the parent directories in case they don't already exist. This fixes a directory permissions problem with the AIX package when the /usr/local directories don't already exist.

Major changes between version 1.7.8 and 1.7.9b1:

Fixed a false positive in visudo strict mode when aliases are in use.
The line on which a syntax error is reported in the sudoers file is now more accurate. Previously it was often off by a line.
The #include and #includedir directives in sudoers now support relative paths. If the path is not fully qualified it is expected to be located in the same directory of the sudoers file that is including it.
visudo will now fix the mode on the sudoers file even if no changes are made unless the -f option is specified.
The "use_loginclass" sudoers option works properly again.
For LDAP-based sudoers, values in the search expression are now escaped as per RFC 4515.
Fixed a race condition when I/O logging is not enabled that could result in tty-generated signals (e.g. control-C) being received by the command twice.
If none of the standard input, output or error are connected to a tty device, sudo will now check its parent's standard input, output or error for the tty name on systems with /proc and BSD systems that support the KERN_PROC_PID sysctl. This allows tty-based tickets to work properly even when, e.g. standard input, output and error are redirected to /dev/null.
Fixed a bug where a pattern like "/usr/*" included /usr/bin/ in the results, which would be incorrectly be interpreted as if the sudoers file had specified a directory.
"visudo -c" will now list any include files that were checked in addition to the main sudoers file when everything parses OK.
Users that only have read-only access to the sudoers file may now run "visudo -c". Previously, write permissions were required even though no writing is down in check-only mode.

Major changes between version 1.7.8rc3 and 1.7.8rc5:

The LOGNAME, USER and USERNAME environment variables are preserved correctly again in sudoedit mode.

Major changes between version 1.7.8rc2 and 1.7.8rc3:

Two PAM session issues have been resolved. In previous versions of sudo, the PAM session was opened as one user and closed as another. Additionally, if no authentication was performed, the PAM session would never be closed.

Major changes between version 1.7.8rc1 and 1.7.8rc2:

Updated TROUBLESHOOTING file to match the current state of things.
Fixed some warnings on FreeBSD.
sudo -n -l now works correctly.

Major changes between version 1.7.7 and 1.7.8rc1:

Sudo will now use PAM by default on AIX 6 and higher.
Added --enable-werror configure option for gcc's -Werror flag.
Visudo no longer assumes all editors support the +linenumber command line argument. It now uses a whitelist of editors known to support the option.
Fixed matching of network addresses when a netmask is specified but the address is not the first one in the CIDR block.
The configure script now check whether or not errno.h declares the errno variable. Previously, sudo would always declare errno itself for older systems that don't declare it in errno.h.
The NOPASSWD tag is now honored for denied commands too, which matches historic sudo behavior (prior to sudo 1.7.0).
Sudo now honors the "DEREF" setting in ldap.conf which controls how alias dereferencing is done during an LDAP search.

Major changes between version 1.7.6p2 and 1.7.7rc1:

I/O logging is now supported for commands run in background mode (using sudo's -b flag).
Group ownership of the sudoers file is now only enforced when the file mode on sudoers allows group readability or writability.
Visudo now checks the contents of an alias and warns about cycles when the alias is expanded.
If the user specifes a group via sudo's -g option that matches the target user's group in the password database, it is now allowed even if no groups are present in the Runas_Spec.
sudo -i command now works correctly with the bash version 2.0 and higher. Previously, the .bash_profile would not be sourced prior to running the command unless bash was built with NON_INTERACTIVE_LOGIN_SHELLS defined.
Multi-factor authentication is now supported on AIX.
Added support for non-RFC 4517 compliant LDAP servers that require that seconds be present in a timestamp, such as Tivoli Directory Server.
If the group vector is to be preserved, the PATH search for the command is now done with the user's original group vector.
For LDAP-based sudoers, the runas_default sudoOption now works properly in a sudoRole that contains a sudoCommand.
Spaces in command line arguments for sudo -s and sudo -i are now escaped with a backslash when checking the sudoers file.

Major changes between version 1.7.6b3 and 1.7.6b4:

The %#gid syntax is now fully functional and documented.
If there is an existing sudoers file, verify that it parses properly before installing sudo via make install.
The testsudoers utility now supports runas groups and has more useful return values.
Removed redundant AIX-specified code when setting resource limits.

Major changes between version 1.7.6b2 and 1.7.6b3:

The sudoers parser now treats a newline in the middle of a double quoted string as an error unless a line continuation character was used. Previously, the text between the double quote and the newline was discarded.
Fixed a potential crash when a non-regular file (e.g. a directory) is present in an includedir.
A uid or gid is now allowed in per-user and per-runas Defaults entries.
The sudoers parser now returns an error when an empty string is found where a word was expected.
Fixed printing of ALL in an Alias in testsudoers.

Major changes between version 1.7.6b1 and 1.7.6b2:

Whitespace is now allowed after the modifier in a Defaults entry. E.g. Defaults: username set_home
The sudoers parser now returns an error for a Defaults line that comes immediately after a line continuation character.

Major changes between version 1.7.5 and 1.7.6b1:

A new LDAP setting, sudoers_search_filter, has been added to ldap.conf. This setting can be used to restrict the set of records returned by the LDAP query. Based on changes from Matthew Thomas.
White space is now permitted within a User_List when used in conjunction with a per-user Defaults definition.
Support for double-quoted words in the sudoers file has been fixed. The change in 1.7.5 for escaping the double quote character caused the double quoting to only be available at the beginning of an entry.
The fix for resuming a suspended shell in 1.7.5 caused problems with resuming non-shells on Linux. Sudo will now save the process group ID of the program it is running on suspend and restore it when resuming, which fixes both problems.
A bug that could result in corrupted output in "sudo -l" has been fixed.