Claude Code and Cursor on Linux can't handle interactive terminal prompts. If you ask the agent to run sudo apt install something and you get sudo: Authentication failed. I want the ability to do case-by-case review and approval of sudo commands, the same as I can already do with any other command.

The common workarounds all have problems. Anthropic's official recommendation is to whitelist specific commands in /etc/sudoers and .claude/settings.json, which requires predicting every command the agent will ever need. Passwordless sudo gives the agent — and anything else running as my user — unrestricted root. Until now, I've been copy-pasting commands, which is unacceptable in the year 2026.

A thread on the Claude Code tracker pointed me at the approach that solves this, and I've packaged it as sudoplz.

How it works

sudo has a built-in hook for non-interactive password entry: SUDO_ASKPASS. Given a program that produces your password on stdout, the sudo -A <cmd> invokes that program instead of prompting for your password interactively in the terminal.

By setting SUDO_ASKPASS to sudoplz, every time the agent runs sudo -A:

• A dialog pops up showing the exact command about to run
• If you click Allow, it decrypts your sudo password using your SSH private key
• If you click Deny, sudo gets nothing and fails

The password is stored encrypted with age (for Ed25519 keys) or OpenSSL (for RSA). Along with the SSH-key gate, there's a caller-path whitelist, parent-process whitelist, rate limiting, and automatic expiration. The threat model assumes a personal workstation with an encrypted disk and a passphrase-protected SSH key — not a shared or production system.

Using it

uv tool install sudoplz
export SUDO_ASKPASS="$(which askpass)"
sudoplz set                               # store the password, once

sudo -A systemctl start tailscaled        # agents can now do this

Full setup, TOTP fallback for SSH sessions, and security configuration are in the README.

Credits

The idea — an SSH-key-encrypted sudo password served via SUDO_ASKPASS, gated by a confirmation dialog — is from GlassOnTin/secure-askpass. That project is dormant and had a bunch of issues. sudoplz is a substantially rewritten and cleaned up fork.