Alas, this approach does not yield fruit for the traditional core Unix files such as in /etc, these are not exposed through the Finder interface.

However there are a lot of potentially sensitive files that could be trivially replaced by modified versions if this tactic works everywhere, i.e. /System/Library/Security/authorization.plist

> Alas, this approach does not yield fruit for the traditional core Unix files such as in /etc, these are not exposed through the Finder interface.

⇧⌘G in Finder, type in /etc and press enter.

Learn something new every day! Should have thought of 'open' though.

So if I do this "Terminal drop" thing on a plain file (like sudoers) I gain no special powers, Unix perms still apply. So maybe this only does something on directories.

> these are not exposed through the Finder interface

Just press cmd-shift-dot.

> these are not exposed through the Finder interface.

    cd /etc && open .

"open /etc" works too.

I don't know. I'm not addressing the underlying problem and it's veracity, I'm addressing the semantic confusion of op's intent regarding edit of the sudoers file.

Correct, it does not bypass Unix permissions.

That would be insane.