Not really - to sudo, your shell would have to be setuid - and constantly fork stuff as you to get user permissions. Alternatively your shell could maintain a

Not really - to sudo, your shell would have to be setuid - and constantly fork stuff as you to get user permissions. Alternatively your shell could maintain a separate process for privileged access, but that puts a whole lot of your security on the assumption that your shell has no bugs that might allow escalation. In short, you could do it, but it'd be ripped out of every server that's been hardened, and for users that don't want to care - they're just running 'sudo su' anyhow. Speaking only for myself, the thought of my shell having a magical escalation process would scare the bejeezus out of me - and I'm supposed to have root on our boxes!