OS X Catalina: add user to sudoers Prior to OS X Catalina I could add a user to the sudoers by editing /etc/sudoers with an admin account.

With OS X Catalina, I can no longer do this as it seems that Catalina moved to a read-only root filesystem and so /etc/sudoers cannot be edited.

According to this official Apple User Guide, it appears that the sudoers file is now located at /private/etc/sudoers, but I am still unable to edit this file with an admin account.

What is the correct way to grant a user sudouers access in Catalina?
It turns out that even an admin user needs to use sudo to edit the sudoers file at /private/etc/sudoers so the following did the trick to open the file for edit:

$ sudo visudo /private/etc/sudoers


As usual, a user can be added to the list of sudoers by adding a line such as this:

username ALL=(ALL) ALL