how to change owner of sudoer file in centos that has been mistakenly changed to nonexisting user

Question

i mistakenly changed ownership of /etc/sudoers file to a non-existing user, and now i can't revert it back nor do anything about it.

how can i force it to change the owner to root?

-r--r----- 1 755 1417 Dec 12 12:39 sudoers

Answer 1

i fixed this by booting into single user mode and then chmod back to 0440.