The op tool provides a flexible means for system administrators to grant access to certain root operations without having to give them full superuser privileges. different sets of users may access different operations, and the security-related aspects of each operation can be carefully controlled.

the main attraction of op over sudo is the use of mnemonics rather than true commands. this allows an administrator to present users with more intuitive commands.

other available features are:

- fine-grained per-command control
- a really short name
- host-based access control
- command expiration
- variable expansion
- multi-line arguments