Description:

Sudo (superuser do) allows a permitted user to execute a command as
the superuser (real and effective uid and gid are set to 0 and root's
group as set in the passwd file respectively).

Sudo determines who is an authorized user by consulting the file
/etc/sudoers. By giving sudo the -v flag a user can update the time
stamp without running a command. The password prompt itself will also
time out if the password is not entered with N minutes (again, this is
defined at installation time and defaults to 5 minutes).