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Editing the sudoers file on Mac or Linux when you have no permissions

Stephen C
Harrison

I’m trying to install something on my MacOS (or Linux) system and I don’t have permission because I’m not the admin. So I tried using sudo and it says that I’m not in /etc/sudoers file. I’ve tried editing the sudoers file but it won’t let me, so I “googled” it. Everybody says to use visudo to edit the file. The problem is, it won’t even let me use visudo! When I type “visudo” it just says

visudo: /etc/sudoers: Permission denied

Would appreciate some help. Thanks in advance!

EDIT: I tried switching users and then editing the sudoers file but still didn’t work

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Answer

You need to be root (or have rootprivileges) in order to use the visudo command and edit the sudoers file