chown: changing ownership of '/etc/sudoers'

I want to work with kusnetes of AWS. I tried to install AWS CLI,

This command:

curl "" -o "awscliv2.zip"

succeeded. But when I ran

sudo ./aws/install

I got an error:

sudo: /etc/sudoers is owned by uid 1000, should be 0
sudo: no valid sudoers sources found, quitting
sudo: unable to initialize policy plugin

when I ran:

su - root
Password:
su: Authentication failure

and when I ran:

chown root /etc/sudoers

I got:

chown: changing ownership of '/etc/sudoers': Operation not permitted

What is the problem?

1 Answer

The problem is exactly what the error messages say.

Do you know the root password? If so, you should be typing that into the su command.

If su doesn’t work, see if you can login as root.

If that doesn’t work, try booting into emergency single-user mode.