Fix broken access to sudo

Oh, I don’t know when this might be handy [1][2]!

If you get this error:

sudo: unable to initialize PAM: No such file or directory

Do not panic, it is likely that there is some drama with the /etc/pam.d/sudo_local file. I had this when I made a mess of the links above. The file was owned by root and I could not sudo vim to fix it.

To resolve this, open the folder in the terminal to Finder:

open /etc/pam.d

Then right click on the sudo_local file and select “Get Info”. In the “Sharing & Permissions” section, ensure that your user has “Read & Write” access. If not, change it to “Read & Write”. Then edit the file to hopefully fix the issue.