How do you pronounce sudo?

#discuss #unix #linux #cli

Ben Halpern

Aug 27, 2019 ・1 min read

Not necessarily how it's "supposed" to be pronounced, what do you say? (in your head or aloud)

How do you pronounce `sudo`?

soo-dough
soo-doo

Discuss: Were you ever taught this by anyone? Have you thought about this much?

P.S. Polls are still private admin features, but we'll make them general soon enough

Discussion (125)

Avalander • Aug 27 '19

Neither, I've aliased sudo to please.

Gabriel Arazas • Aug 27 '19

please kill me

Yeaaaah, sounds about right.

Avalander • Aug 27 '19

Useful after a tough day

Smit Patel • Aug 28 '19

Is this reddit, yet?

David Brewer • Aug 28 '19

I've never aliased sudo but i always alias python to pythong because I can never type that right

Matt Moran • Aug 28 '19

I aliased it to fucking.

Muhammad Arslan Aslam • Oct 14 '19

In case you use zsh...

github.com/nvbn/thefuck

CodeCo • Aug 27 '19

please remove recursively and force it irreversibly

Oleksii Filonenko • Aug 28 '19

Okay, we need a shell framework for rhyming command aliases.

Fulton Browne • Aug 27 '19

How did you do that?

Avalander • Aug 27 '19

I added this to my .bashrc file:

alias please='sudo'

Fulton Browne • Aug 27 '19

thx

Stephanie Handsteiner • Aug 27 '19 • Edited

alias please="sudo " in your .bash_profile

Adam Crockett • Aug 28 '19

That's now on my to-do list 🥰

nadeeminamdar • Aug 29 '19

You mean "too-doo" or "too-dough", :-) ?

Ben Halpern • Aug 28 '19

I love this!

Jaime 🔥🧙‍♂️🔥 • Aug 27 '19

sudo as in s-u-d-o (Spanish pronunciation). It means literally "I sweat".

sudo rm -rf

I sweat as I remove all files from my file system

Nicolò Rebughini • Aug 28 '19

Came here expecting this, I'm satisfied with the internet once again.

Tiash • Aug 27 '19

In italian too 😂

Jason R Tibbetts • Aug 28 '19

Latin, too.

Alesis Manzano • Aug 27 '19

idem

Matteo Nunziati • Aug 28 '19

This

Henry Williams • Aug 28 '19

That's a good one 😂

🦄N B🛡 • May 14 '20

Necessito a usar eso con mi compañeros.

Benny Powers 🇮🇱🇨🇦 • Aug 27 '19

obligatory xkcd

Giuseppe Vetri • Aug 27 '19 • Edited

Sudo like sudowoodo

ΔNDRΞW • Aug 27 '19

SUDOWOODO shake shake shake shake shake shake

Arden de Raaij • Aug 27 '19

came here to post the same 💚

Giuseppe Vetri • Aug 27 '19

Sudowoodo is life 💚

Alex Pedro • Aug 31 '19

I was hoping to see this in the comments! :D

Stephen E. Chiang • Aug 28 '19

Man so did I! 😂

Cécile Lebleu • Aug 27 '19

ssu-ssu-ssudio

Fred Richards • Aug 27 '19

Phil Collins taught us long ago...

Yechiel Kalmenson • Aug 27 '19

I pronounce it as "please" 🤗

Katerina Borodina

@kathyra_

protip: alias sudo to "please" for a much more wholesome unix experience

07:16 AM - 12 Aug 2019

9730 25378

Ben Halpern • Aug 27 '19

That’s good 🙂

Sidhant Panda • Aug 27 '19

I've added the following alias

alias please='sudo $(fc -ln -1)'

So now,

~$ bash ./helloworld
bash: ./helloworld: permission denied
~$ please
Hello World!

Source twitter.com/zzaaho/status/11608251...

Martin Wallgren • Nov 27 '19

The previous command can be found in !!

alias please='sudo !!'

sgcdialler • Aug 28 '19

If only there were a way to change 'permission denied' to 'ask nicely'!

Muhammad Arslan Aslam • Sep 2 '19

I can say that I've successfully wasted an hour looking to see if this was possible!

Andrew Bone • Aug 27 '19

Sue Doe sounds like a lovely lady.

Dan Conn • Aug 27 '19

Sister of Jon though.

Lars Richter • Aug 29 '19

You are right. Would like to meet her some day. Somehow I think, I would do everything she tells me to do.

Chad Hudson • Aug 28 '19

That Sue Doe

Austin S. Hemmelgarn • Aug 27 '19

Habitually like the US English pronunciation of 'pseudo'.

When actually explaining the command to people though, I pronounce it as three syllables, spelling out the first two letters and pronouncing the last two just like the English word 'do', because that's how it breaks down as an acronym (short for 'Switch User and DO', derived from su for 'Switch User').

mARK bLOORE • Nov 15 '19

linux and MacOSX man su say "substitute user" (though "switch" seems to make more sense). but i'm pretty sure that in the old days it was "superuser", which is the default user to switch to.

Austin S. Hemmelgarn • Nov 16 '19

It's ambiguous in the original manual (page 17 of bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/man13.pdf, which is a scanned version of the original Version 1 UNIX manual), which does mention becoming 'super-user', but only once and not as the command name. I'm a bit too lazy to figure out when it changed from switching to UID 0 to being able to switch to any user, as that's likely to be the first place it's mentioned as switch or substitute.

All I've ever heard people say when talking about it is 'switch' though, probably because that's the mental flow for most people.

Anton T • Aug 27 '19

I thought it was short for "Super User Do"? 🤔

Austin S. Hemmelgarn • Aug 28 '19

I've heard people say that, but it's pretty well established that sudo is derived from the old UNIX su command, which is definitely 'switch user'. It just happens that both have the root user as the default user to when a specific user isn't specified and that's the common case, but there's nothing that prevents you from using it to switch to any user (and by default, the root user can use sudo to do so without needing a password).

Josef Strzibny • Aug 30 '19

No, it's not. It's from su command "switch user". Also check the man page that says "sudo, sudoedit — execute a command as another user".

Kasey Speakman • Aug 27 '19 • Edited

Pseudo. I always took it as being a pseudo-superuser if your user account has sudo permission. Also, the two vowels used are different so it feels more natural (to me) to use different sounds between the syllables. I heard it pronounced "pseudo" for years before I heard some random video on the internet pronounce it as "doo". I just took it as that person not knowing any better and felt bad for them. But I guess it is possible that my pronunciation has been wrong or that popular opinion can change what is "right". (Look at gif, where most of the internet disagrees with the creator of the format on pronunciation.)

The "please" meme is kinda funny, but in my mind it builds the wrong mental model of what sudo is for. It is a protection from making mistakes, a design feature to isolate user-level from system-level changes. Not courtesy. Well anyway, I guess there's nothing wrong with having fun with it as long as you know it's actual purpose.

Josef Strzibny • Aug 30 '19

No, it's not superuser actually. It's from su command "switch user". Also check the man page that says "sudo, sudoedit — execute a command as another user". That means not necessary superuser.

Kasey Speakman • Aug 30 '19 • Edited

You are right, the commands are named for "switch user" not "super user". However, I still think of it as pseudo superuser because that is the default user that you switch to with su or sudo and is the way I use it 99% of the time. And "psuedo" also resonates really well with sudo because you aren't fully switching to the other user to execute the command like you do with su. (Still shows up in original user's command history, etc.)

Kyle Boe • Aug 27 '19 • Edited

I use soo-doo because it is the compilation of the phonetics from the command's unabbreviated form:

superuser do

Jérôme Gamez • Aug 27 '19 • Edited

Non-native speaker here, asking just out of curiosity: if phonetic (assuming English) why isn’t that syou-doo ?🙈

Kyle Boe • Aug 27 '19

You're totally right. It should be:

superuser do

I just looked it up and "superuser" is one word. I'll correct my original post.

Also, as a native English speaker, I'm sorry the language is so weird.

Simon Massey • Aug 27 '19

Totally that is what we day ”syou-do” because it's superuser do.

Josef Strzibny • Aug 30 '19

No, it's not superuser do. It's from su command "switch user". Also check the man page that says "sudo, sudoedit — execute a command as another user".

Carlos Trapet • Aug 27 '19 • Edited

Depends on the context. I pronounce it su-dont if followed by rm -rf

Ryan Palo • Aug 27 '19

soo-DO IT MOTHER TRUCKER.

Jude Pineda • Aug 27 '19

I very often slip and type (and pronounce) sudo as sagi.

It's because I aliased sudo apt-get install to sagi and it's my most used Linux command.

Jhinel Arcaya • Aug 28 '19

This is so cool!

Buzz Zhang • Apr 8 '20

sudo sounds like 速度(sudu) in China, which means speed, hurry up!

Arden de Raaij • Aug 27 '19

Like sudowoodo!

Thomas H Jones II • Aug 28 '19

Was this posted, previously, as a different type of post? Could swear I'd already commented on a similar post a week or so ago.

I wonder how many people intentionally butcher the pronunciation of something just to mess with people (or otherwise to see how many people they can convince, "no, this is the right way,").

Christian Haas • Aug 28 '19

How about man pages are required to also include the intended pronunciation including IPA key? That would be fun :)

This would also settle stuff like "awk", "chroot", or "nginx"...

Mike Lockhart • Aug 29 '19

I've tried to "correct" myself and start saying "soo-doo", but I keep doing back to the dough. I think it's because of the Simpsons influence ("duh-oh! Soo dough bang bang'), or maybe because dough rhymes with go.

Adam K Dean • Feb 25 '20

soo-dough

Were you ever taught this by anyone?

Nope. I read it on the gentoo wiki when I was compiling Linux at the age of 12.

Have you thought about this much?

Not really, but I remember learning sometime in the last decade that it stood for super-user-do, which makes soo-doo make sense, but 20 years of soo-dough makes it unchangeable in my brain.

Ryan Westlund • Jan 25 '20

Wooooo! soo-dough is in the lead! :D

I was taught -dough at first being introduced to Linux, then my mentor found out it came from "superuser do" and was therefore -doo, but I was too stubborn to change :) Nowadays I still call it -dough just because I think it sounds better.

nadeeminamdar • Aug 29 '19

I always pronounced it as "soo-dough".. until I realized "soo-doo" is more appropriate as it conveys "do as a super user". I am surprised soo-dough scored so much higher!

Damir Franusic • Aug 29 '19

Maybe it's su--

Jeremy Forsythe • Mar 8 '20

Soo-dough because it rolls off the tongue better and because the *nix geeks my dad hung around with when I was a wee bitty kid in the 80-90s pronounced it that way.

Similarly to how we learned to pronounce gif (JIF) correctly before most of you were out of diapers 🤣

Matthew Francis • Aug 27 '19

Like "judo"

Todor Todorov • Aug 27 '19

In our country everybody pronounces sudo like judo :)
It is funny for everybody else, but it is how it is here :)

Robin Kretzschmar • Aug 27 '19

I normally pronounce it "sudoh".
But as I was reading this poll, somehow in my mind I pronounced it funny in a Japanese way like "suuuuzdooo" (imagine a Japanese anime voice) 🤣

Fred Richards • Aug 27 '19

Kids have Play-Doh.
Adults have Su-Doh.

Massimo Artizzu • Aug 28 '19

Neither.

soodoh

Phonetically it's [suˈdo]
Accidentally, "sudo" in Italian means "I sweat". Puns usually ensue.

Richard Lenkovits • Aug 27 '19

In hungarian language "s" is pronounced as "sh" (and "sz" is "s"), so I say it like "shudo" :D

Dylan Davenport • Nov 29 '19

I looked it up and Sudo is short for “Superuser do” which I didn’t know before. Never thought to look it up 😏 Which leads me to believe it SHOULD be pronounced “soo doo” which is a bummer because it sounds weird so I’ll keep pronouncing it “soo dough”.

Amara Graham • Aug 28 '19

I imagine I was taught by my first CS professor and she had a VERY strong accent. It took me far too long to realize "struct trees" were actually "structures". 😂

mARK bLOORE • Nov 15 '19

accents can be fun. i had a math prof who taught us about furrier serious.

Pacharapol Withayasakpunt • Oct 10 '20 • Edited

Why not saa-daa, for Substitute User Does?

🦄N B🛡 • May 14 '20 • Edited

I pronounce it, "Fran that # sign better not mean you're root just to run journalctl."

Andrew Brooks 👨‍💻 • Aug 27 '19

Su-doo-doo 💩

Roelof Jan Elsinga • Aug 27 '19

Am I the only one that didn't know there was another way to pronounce this? I feel a bit silly 😅

Alan Solitar • Aug 27 '19

It's dough that you sue :)

sue dough

Victor Homem Heck • Aug 27 '19

as I think that sudo is a abreviation from Super User Do I read as normal Do

Darryn Dumisani Ph☻enix-92 • Aug 28 '19

The same as pseudo
Dough drags it out too long. But it's that sound.

Meghan (she/her) • Aug 29 '19 • Edited

This is like 'gif' vs 'jif'. I know it stands for super-user-do but here, the "right" answer is wrong.

Clint • Nov 17 '19

do you mean pseudo code
google.com/search?q=sudo+code&rlz=...

Garrett • Aug 27 '19

I know it's "soo-doo" but I still pronounce it "soo-dough" like the Pokemon Sudowoodo.

hadderakk • Nov 29 '19

soo-doh or as "judo" if j==s 😜

Andrew Brown 🇨🇦 • Aug 27 '19

SUH DO

Adam Crockett • Aug 27 '19

Like the amaracan colour to color, in programming we all need to stick to conventions regardless of correctness. Besides soo-doo is almost a pokomon woo-doo

Carlos Magno • Aug 28 '19

Very well, that's a good question. I usually use the Brazilian Portuguese pronunciation, so I think it's more like "soo-dough"

Dan Conn • Aug 27 '19

I said it like this since learning the command and haven't really thought about it. But I think most people that I work with say it soo-dough too, although there are a few that say soo-doo.