I also found this a bit overly obvious at first, yet when considering it from an unintended side effects/uses perspective it's actually a valid thing to conside

I also found this a bit overly obvious at first, yet when considering it from an unintended side effects/uses perspective it's actually a valid thing to consider. For example, `less`[0] might be used with `sudo` to view a file owned by another user. This is all good until you remember that you can run arbitrary commands by just hitting '!' in the paging view, which are also runs with `sudo` privileges. Though that might seem like a bit of a contrived example, through unintended features otherwise safe tools can be unexpectedly dangerous (the entire point of this site). For a real-ish world example of this effect, one of the OverTheWire wargame challenges [1] (spoilers for bandit) has a user login "shell" be a message saying login was prohibited, printed with `less`. When you resize your console window to a point where scrolling is needed and then attempt login, you can then interact with `less` and use '!' to run commands as the current user and print the key. Now you may say this isn't relevant to the `sudo` category of risk since who runs `sudo less` without also being able to run `sudo anything`, but many other apps use less as their pager, and some of those make much more sense to allow for general use with sudo (like say allowing all users to update apps, or any of hundreds of other insignificant things). In short, I think the `sudo` and `setuid` notices might be better considered as "permission transparent", i.e. any permissions or access you hand to the listed tools are handed directly to the user as well. There are secure ways to not do this when writing programs, like by setting all of the real, effective, and saved uids [2] to something non-root (or the original calling user, if available) and totally wiping the capabilities sets before `exec()`ing anything, yet that's just what I remember from a computer security class a few years ago, you would probably be best off looking into it further if you're writing anything security sensitive. [0]: https://gtfobins.github.io/gtfobins/less/ https://gtfobins.github.io/gtfobins/less/ [1]: https://overthewire.org/wargames/bandit/ https://overthewire.org/wargames/bandit/ [2]: https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/setresuid.2.html https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/setresuid.2.html