If you're coming from any Linux distributions, chances that you're already familiar with sudo. Sudo is a program designed to allow a sysadmin to give limited root privileges to users and log root activity. Unlike su, sudo authenticates users against their own password rather than that of the target user. Sudo allows a system administrator to delegate authority to give certain users (or groups of users) the ability to run some (or all) commands as root or another user while providing an audit trail of the commands and their arguments. This allow the delegation of specific commands to specific users on specific hosts without sharing passwords among them.