1. Provides limited super user privileges to specific users. Sudo is a program designed to allow a sysadmin to give limited root privileges to users and log root activity. The basic philosophy is to give as few privileges as possible but still allow people to get their work done. From Debian 3.0r0 APT

2. Sudo (superuser do) allows a system administrator to give certain users (or groups of users) the ability to run some (or all) commands as root while logging all commands and arguments. Sudo operates on a per-command basis. It is not a replacement for the shell. Features include: the ability to restrict what commands a user may run on aper-host basis, copious logging of each command (providing a clear audit trail of who did what), a configurable timeout of the sudo command, and the ability to use the same configuration file (sudoers) on many different machines. From Redhat 8.0 RPM