Thomas Mathiesen’s Blog

I have been trying to add a “shutdown icon” to the gnome desktop on Ubuntu 8.10. The goal is for the user to just double-click that icon, and the machine shuts down.
My issue was that triggering the /sbin/poweroff binary would only ask for my password:

myuser@mydesktop:/tmp$ sudo /sbin/poweroff
password:

So, I added myself to the /etc/sudoers file:
myuser ALL = NOPASSWD: /sbin/poweroff

and it simply DID NOT work!

I came across a post telling me why…
The reason is that /etc/sudoers is being read from the bottom and up. So, I was in a group that was mentioned on the bottom, which required passwords for everything. Now I move the line (myuser ALL = NOPASSWD: /sbin/poweroff) to the bottom of the file, and my gnome launcher works fine!