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Level 1

38 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

35 replies

mchw

Level 1

14 points

Jun 29, 2013 6:13 PM in response to Alberto Ravasio

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.

sinjon2112 Author

Level 1

38 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."

kalmdown

Level 1

6 points

Apr 9, 2014 9:19 PM in response to sinjon2112

Was having the same problem. Found if I typed 1st character, hit Backspace and then typed password it removed the capitalization and worked.

Jun 12, 2015 7:45 PM in response to sinjon2112

Try doing "su root" instead of sudo.

Once you do that, you get the password prompt. Your root password should work now

Password not working with Sudo