I'm using macOS catalina 10.15.7. I recently found out i cannot run sudo anymore, tried to run
Followed other posts online, i was able to find /etc/sudoers.d folder and sudoers file, and right click
At one point of time i was able to run
sudo brew install nats-server
, and got this message:
is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
I got my username by whoami
. By running id
, i see 80(admin)
was listed there.
Went to System Preferences -> Users & Groups, I saw my name (full name not my username) is listed under Current User
as Admin, Mobile
.
get Info
, i added my username back to the permission list which allow me to read and write, the changes were made to both /etc/sudoers.d folder and sudoers file.

sudo visudo /private/etc/sudoers
and found out the line for admin was commented out, so i removed the comment to re-enable it, now the file has root and admin enabled, no other user:
root ALL = (ALL) ALL
admin ALL = (ALL) ALL
and at the bottom of the file, i saw:
## Read drop-in files from /private/etc/sudoers.d
## (the '#' here does not indicate a comment)
#includedir /private/etc/sudoers.d
after all these changes i still cannot run sudo:
sudo brew update
sudo: 4294967295,2416387072,32767,0,0,0,0,0,0,0: invalid value
sudo: error initializing audit plugin sudoers_audit
sudo brew update
Password:
is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported
is admin and my username the same user? it should be, right? do i have to add my username in /private/etc/sudoers file separately?
Update:
run id -un
, it shows my username
run ls -l /etc/sudoers
, it shows:
-r--r-----+ 1 root wheel 1562 Jun 29 10:06 /etc/sudoers
Asked by user468587
(121 rep)
Jun 29, 2021, 06:59 PM
Last activity: Mar 12, 2025, 05:44 PM
Last activity: Mar 12, 2025, 05:44 PM