After a comment I made the other day, I remembered the sudo make me a sandwich xkcd comic

Proper User Policy apparently means Simon Says.

It occured to me that commanding someone by saying ‘sudo make me …’ is not very nice and it would be better to say ‘please make me …’. I wondered if my computers would appreciate the same politeness.

I have now set up my computers with an alias so that if you type ‘please’, it acts like you typed ‘sudo’.

The command to do this yourself is:

alias please='sudo'

To make these permanent you can put the alias lines to your ~/.bash_profile file. Now you can have fun and ask nicely:

:::console marshall@revo:/var/local$ mkdir stuff mkdir: cannot create directory `stuff’: Permission denied marshall@revo:/var/local$ please mkdir stuff [sudo] password for marshall: marshall@revo:/var/local$ ``