Indeed, if you trust somebody enough with a login on your system, you presumably have an expectation of some kind of good faith. If you further grant them sudo

Indeed, if you trust somebody enough with a login on your system, you presumably have an expectation of some kind of good faith. If you further grant them sudo to run binaries like these with arbitrary args, that implies some even greater level of trust, and that user presumably understands the social contract at play. They should know to abide by the intent of the sudo restriction (rather than trying to work around it with clever invocations). I was a sysadmin in a former life, and I didn't usually expect 'sudo' to provide a thorough technical defense against a user intent on wreaking havoc. As typically configured, with blanket access to one or more tools that allow arbitrary file manipulation, it's more like a subtle nudge than a real guardrail. You hope and assume the user respects you and their access level in a way such that they don't work around obvious intent. It's of course possible to limit the use of 'sudo' carefully (i.e., restrict it to invoking wrapper scripts around specific functions which accept minimal user input) but it's often not expedient to do so, and often expedience rules the day.