technical question

[Raphaël Berbain]

* Norman Silverstone:

> For a number of administration actions it is necessary for me to enter a
> password. Once this has been done this entry remains in force for some
> time before I am required to enter the password again. Can someone
> please tell me how long this delay is or, if it is machine dependant,
> how do I find out other than by trial and error? I want to carry out
> some tests and it is important for me to know this timing fairly
> accurately.

Look for 'timestamp_timeout' in the sudoers manpage.  The default is
15 minutes.  I think the default /etc/sudoers also has tty_tickets set
(not sure, but I don't think I changed it), which means the
authentication takes place per tty.  Also related, sudo's -k & -v
command-line switches.