One of the great things about the Android OS is the freedom that the user has to customize and edit various configurations. In this article, I’ll be going over how you can install sudo in the Android terminal emulator Termux. By doing so, you effectively have root priviledges as you would on any other linux distro. One of the biggest reasons I wanted root priviledges was to access saved wifi keys on my device. It goes without mentioning that you can’t really view these keys using the UI and the same is true for iOS devices. So with that context in mind, let’s get right into it.

Note: Sudo only works on rooted devices so please make sure your device is rooted before following along with this guide

Install Termux

Go to your Playstore or Fdroid(recommended), search and install termux.

Open your termux console and follow these instructions:

The first thing you’ll want to do is update your source files and upgrade your packages

apt update && apt upgrade

Next, install git if you don’t have it already

pkg install git

Clone the sudo repository.(It used to be on github but was moved to gitlab. [after the Microsoft move I guess])

git clone https://gitlab.com/st42/termux-sudo.git

Move into the sudo directory and install the ncurses-utils library

cd termux-sudo && pkg install ncurses-utils

Finally write the content of the sudo file into your /data/ directory

cat sudo > /data/data/com.termux/files/usr/bin/sudo

# then...

chmod 700 /data/data/com.termux/files/usr/bin/sudo

Then enjoy the new root priviledges

As an example, let’s check the saved wifi keys on our device

cd /data/misc/wifi/

# to view the saved keys, type..

cat wpa_supplicant.conf

There you go, you should now be able to perform root operations on your android device. That being said, make sure you don’t tamper with any sensitive device files.

With great power comes great responsibility