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I tried to install sudo with apt install sudo but it won't work. I got these errors:

E: Could not open lock file /var/lib/dpkg/lock-frontend - open (13: Permission denied)  
E: Unable to acquire the dpkg frontend lock (/var/lib/dpkg/lock-frontend), are you root?

I am always required to give root access whenever i want to open some files in the terminal but i can't do that without sudo

Kulfy
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Haq
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    Which Ubuntu release are you using? sudo most of the times is pre-installed. Did you purge/uninstall that? What is the output of type -a sudo? – Kulfy Jun 23 '20 at 17:14
  • @Kulfy, isn't sudo installled all the time? How would you get root access and privileges without it? – Ollie Jun 23 '20 at 17:17
  • You need to install sudo in debian. In ubuntu, it's already packaged. Here, you get the normal output of apt install run without sudo.

    Insteed, try sudo apt install cowsay. Sudo gives the root rights temporarely so you can install cowsay. Without sudo, you can't install any package

     – B. du Garay Jun 23 '20 at 17:20
  • sudo is always packaged with Ubuntu, and according to my experience, also in current versions of Debian, but there are Linux distros, where it is not packaged with the default installations. - But you might remove it by mistake, and that would cause problems in Ubuntu. I guess you can boot in recovery mode (and run as root), and then install `sudo'. – sudodus Jun 23 '20 at 17:23
  • @Kulfy I am using Ubuntu 18.04.3 LTS. I was able to use sudo when i started using Ubuntu, but unluckily for me it stopped working – Haq Jun 23 '20 at 17:25
  • @Ollie If you use Ubuntu in a Docker container, the root account is the default one. And yes sudo isn't installed there. – Kulfy Jun 24 '20 at 05:04

1 Answers1

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Reboot, go to grub menu and select recovery boot.

Then select root console. Run there

mount -o remount,rw /
apt install sudo
Pilot6
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