sudo make me a sandwich

My usage of sudo has gone down over the last couple of years, but enabling Touch ID on my Mac for use with sudo has been a huge win. Yes, you have to take your fingers off the keyboard for this so that might put off many folk.

# Open sudo
sudo vi /etc/pam.d/sudo

# Add this as the very first line
auth sufficient pam_tid.so

This is terribly amazing until you do a system update and it becomes disabled 🙁

To get around that you might consider adding it to your .bash_profile. It is a hidden file and usually located in your home folder:

~/.bash_profile

Open it and add this…

enable-sudo-touchid() {
  sudo sed -i -e '1s;^;auth       sufficient     pam_tid.so\n;' /etc/pam.d/sudo
}

Now the warning. It evaluates this every time you create a new shell or tab, which for me is not very frequently but your mileage may vary.