I was recently working on a Perl script that would SSH to another server and run a sudo command on the remote server that was failing. The error that was received is below.

Error: sudo: sorry, you must have a tty to run sudo

The reason for this is an update along the way with sudo locked it down further by adding the below line to /etc/sudoers configuration file.

Defaults requiretty

To allow a remote script to login and run a command via sudo simply comment out that line as shown below.

# Commented out so remote script can login and run a command without a tty
# Defaults requiretty

I would suggest making a comment in the sudoers file along with the actual script that is running just in case there is another systems administrator that is tasked with working on this server at a later date. Now when your script runs it will not throw that error and should be able to run the remote command that was initially required.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 23rd, 2009 at 6:38 PM and is filed under Errors. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.