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sinjon2112 Author

Level 1

45 points

Password not working with Sudo

Hi, I hope someone can help with this.

I'm trying to run a sudo command in Terminal and when it asks for my password I get "Sorry, try again".

My user account is set up as Admin and I've even tried enabling root user but that didn't make any difference.

The last time I tried sudo was in Snow Leopard and it worked fine. My current install was clean in Lion and then upgraded to 10.8 so there shouldn't be anything hanging around from the old 10.6 install.

Any suggestions as to how I can get my password to work would be appreciated.

Thanks

iMac, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.1)

Posted on Sep 3, 2012 3:48 AM

Top-ranking reply

mchw

Level 1

14 points

Posted on Jun 29, 2013 6:13 PM

The problem (for me at least) is TextExpander. God knows how many times I have "nuked & paved" my Air in order to get rid of this problem.

TextExpander has a setting that capitalises the first letter of the first word of a "sentence". You type your password correctly & TextExpander cleverly capitalises the first letter. You can turn this feature off on an app by app basis in the Preferences.

If you are not using TextExpander then have a look at what else you are running that does something similar i.e. autocorrect or something like this.

I have conatcted Smile & also had this problem echoed at https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4607694?start=0&tstart=0 by joshsmith01.

Hope this helps.

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35 replies

BobHarris

Level 9

55,055 points

Sep 8, 2012 4:53 PM in response to sinjon2112

Everything you have just posted (id -a, /etc/sudoers) all looks good.

And that fact that the alternate Admin account is working, I'm stumped.

How have you reset your password?

via System Preferences -> Accounts (maybe called Users & Groups) ?

or from your terminal session using 'passwd'

if you have tried one, then try the other?

If you have any problems using 'passwd' from your broken account, you can also try it via your alternate Admin account

alt_admin_account's_prompt> sudo passwd broken_account_short_name

I'll also ask some additional stupid questions.

Do you use any corporate domain login stuff with this account? That is to say, was this Mac hooked into your corporate single sign-on login system? If this system is your home system and you did not play with any central login stuff, ignore this question.

useEvil

Level 1

4 points

Jan 1, 2013 10:37 AM in response to sinjon2112

This just started happening to me. My admin account works because I can login with it and even unlock system preferences. Just sudo does not work. I've tried changing my admin password but that didn't work. I tried creating a new admin acount and that didn't work either.

sinjon2112 Author

Level 1

45 points

Apr 7, 2013 2:30 PM in response to ryman242

Hi ryman242 thanks for your suggestion.

I tried enabling root user as per the article, then tried both sudo and su root commands.

Both still return the "Sorry, try again" & "Sorry" response respectively.

sinjon2112 Author

Level 1

45 points

Apr 7, 2013 2:37 PM in response to BobHarris

Hi BobHarris, still struggling with this one.

I tried changing my password in System Prefs> Users & Groups, but that made no difference.

When I tried to change my password using "passwd" in Terminal, I got "authentication token failure"

Any ideas?

Just to cover your last point, none of my Macs have been linked to any corporate sign in facility.

Apr 9, 2013 5:49 AM in response to sinjon2112

the same problem happened to me this week when I updated my system to mountain lion.

no way to sudo any more

my humble opinion is that mountain lion changed the way it handles the keyboard (I know because I am a VI user!) and my password has accented characters that are generated by double keyboard strike!

what can I do? (I can't even cut/paste my password to sudo)

tanks

Apr 9, 2013 6:58 AM in response to sinjon2112

One thing you can try is to recreate the authentication authority entry for your user account. First be sure you have a backup of your system, and then log into the second admin account and open the Directory Utility in the /System/Library/CoreServices/ folder. Then click the Directory Editor toolbar button and then click the small black lock to authenticate. Then select your faulty user account from the list to the left, and then remove the AuthenticationAuthority entry in its entirety (usually two lines, one that mentions Kerberos and the other that mentions ShadowHash).

Follow this by going to the Users & Groups system preferences, selecting the faulty account, and changing the account's password.

See if that helps the system properly accept the passwords.

Apr 9, 2013 7:05 AM in response to grumpy-bear

grumpy-bear wrote:

my humble opinion is that mountain lion changed the way it handles the keyboard (I know because I am a VI user!) and my password has accented characters that are generated by double keyboard strike!

I created a new admin user and assigned to it the password èòàùç

sudo does not complain about the password.

sinjon2112 Author

Level 1

45 points

Jul 1, 2013 4:19 PM in response to mchw

Thanks for the suggestion Mchw. I can't believe after all this time the solution has finally been discovered. It was exactly as you said, the problem was auto capitalisation in Text Expander. After quitting TE my sudo password worked, so I restarted TE then in TE preferences excluded Terminal.app from the auto capitalise function and everything is now as it should be. Thanks again for posting the solution.

mchw

Level 1

14 points

Jul 1, 2013 4:38 PM in response to sinjon2112

Woohoo! 😉

Response from Smile was as follows:

"Thanks for the email. You probably are experiencing this because the terminal is case sensitive - so therefore if you aren't precise with the syntax, then you will have issues."

Barney-15E

Level 10

116,614 points

Sep 3, 2012 3:49 AM in response to sinjon2112

If you are getting only "Sorry, try again" it isn't accepting your password. I'm not sure why not.

You might try changing your password and see if it will work.

ryman242

Level 1

0 points

Jan 4, 2013 1:51 PM in response to sinjon2112

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1528

This seems so roundabout and silly, but it worked for me on Mountain Lion 10.8.2.

Barney-15E

Level 10

116,614 points

Sep 3, 2012 4:04 AM in response to sinjon2112

Check in Console for messages relating to security or sudo and see if it notes anything irregular about your attempts to use sudo.

sinjon2112 Author

Level 1

45 points

Sep 5, 2012 8:33 AM in response to Barney-15E

Thanks Barney. That didn't work unfortunately. Looks like I'll have to move everything to a new user account 😟

Apr 7, 2013 12:33 PM in response to Alberto Ravasio

did you try "su root" instead of "sudo"

sinjon2112 Author

Level 1

45 points

Apr 7, 2013 2:31 PM in response to Alberto Ravasio

Hi Alberto Ravasio

I'd pretty much given up on solving this issue until I got notified of a new post here.

Just used the id command in terminal and my user is a member of 80(admin) group.

Password not working with Sudo