Terminal - Su/Root

[Soulplayer]

Hellow everyone,

I keep coming back to the same problems and only a format fixes this problem:

If I try to use terminal and a command let's say:
nano /private/etc/hosts

edit the file and then try to save it, it gives an error.

so I try to login as root and using the only password my system uses (only one user, marked as administrator) and it keeps denying that password. It also doesn't work with the command su root.

What am I doing wrong? Is there a different login for the root?

Using: Mac Pro 2008 - OS X 10.6.7

Thank you,

Sander

 

[maflynn]

Why not use sudo nano /private/etc/hosts?

That way you'll not need to log in as root

 

[Soulplayer]

you are a life saver . I've googled for an hour and you just gave me the answer.

Thank you!

 

[0488568]

sudo bash == su

 

[initialsBB]

Wirelessly posted (iPhone: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8J2 Safari/6533.18.5)

Of course, but you have to promise to be careful with the sudo !

 

[minifridge1138]

It was failing because the user 'root' is not enabled by default in OS X.

Any account that is an administrator is on the sudo list, though.