The help pages state …
su – run a shell with substitute user and group id’s
sudo – execute a command as another user (or root)
When ‘sudo‘ is used with a command, the command gets executed with privileges set for the user and the group she belongs to. If a password is required and if it is given initially, the session will be valid depending on the time set for each session and the user needn’t have to type the password within that duration. /etc/sudoers is the location where permission settings for sudoers are being set.
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