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Viewing and creating custom insults for sudo

06/07/2017 • 5 minute read

You can spice up your day a little bit with sudo’s option to insult you when you enter a password wrong. You can set this by adding Defaults insults to the /etc/sudoers with sudo visudo. This tells sudo to print responses like this when you enter your password wrong:

$ sudo su
[sudo] password for gkent:
No soap, honkie-lips.
[sudo] password for gkent:
You speak an infinite deal of nothing
[sudo] password for gkent:
Take a stress pill and think things over.

Viewing them all

I wanted to see what the rest of the stored insults were, and didn’t want to enter wrong passwords all day so I went looking for where the insults are stored.

$ find /usr/lib/sudo -type f | xargs grep "Take a stress pill and think things over."
Binary file /usr/lib/sudo/sudoers.so matches

Tells me that they are in /usr/bin/sudo/sudoers.so. That is a binary file though and not very human readable, so you have a few options to view them.

$ strings /usr/lib/sudo/sudoers.so | less

Works but that is still 1594 lines of messy output to read through. For a cleaner view, download the sudo package and examine the plugins/sudoers file:

$ apt-get source sudo
$ cat sudo*/plugins/sudoers/ins_*.h

And you can see all of the insults:

HAL Insults:

Classic Insults:

CSOps Insults:

Goon Show Insults:

Building your own insults

You can make your own insults by modifying plugins/sudoers/insults.h to include the following section in the insults[] array where your insults are called glados:

char *insults[] = {

# ifdef HAL_INSULTS
#  include "ins_2001.h"
# endif

# ifdef GOONS_INSULTS
#  include "ins_goons.h"
# endif

# ifdef CLASSIC_INSULTS
#  include "ins_classic.h"
# endif

# ifdef CSOPS_INSULTS
#  include "ins_csops.h"
# endif

# ifdef GLADOS_INSULTS
#  include "ins_glados.h"
# endif

    (char *) 0

};

Then make the file plugins/sudoers/ins_glados.h look something like this with some insults from GLaDOS:

#ifndef _SUDO_INS_GLADOS_H
#define _SUDO_INS_GLADOS_H

    /*
     * Custom Insult Examples from GLaDOS and Portal 2
     */

"Science has now validated your birth mother's decision to abandon you on a doorstep.",
"Well done. Here come the test results: 'You are a horrible person.' That's what it says. We weren't even testing for that.",
"Remember before when I was talking about smelly garbage standing around being useless? That was a metaphor. I was actually talking about you. And I'm sorry. You didn't react at the time so I was worried it sailed right over your head. That's why I had to call you garbage a second time just now.",
"I honestly, truly didn't think you'd fall for that trap. In fact, I designed a much more elaborate trap further ahead for when you got through with this easy one. If I'd known you'd let yourself get captured this easily, I'd have dangled a turkey leg on a rope from the ceiling.",
"He's not just a regular moron. He's the product of the greatest minds of a generation working together with the express purpose of building the dumbest moron who ever lived.",


#endif /* _SUDO_INS_GLADOS_H */

Now recompile sudo and you will be insulted however you like when you forget your password!

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