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Re:Beware of sudo on OS X by driverdan on Sunday August 16, 2015 @11:19PM (#10071219)
Which is pretty much everyone reading HN.
Re:Beware of sudo on OS X by coldtea on Sunday August 16, 2015 @11:25PM (#10071240)
In which case it's no different to Linux, OpenBSD or whatever.

As long as its your account files that matter, and you're running an app un-sandboxed, then it has access to them.

Nothing Windows or OS X particular about it.

As about "ruining your system", no, without root privileges it cannot, in either OS X or Windows. Of course it can if there's a privilege escalation bug, but there are tons of those for GNU/Gnome/KDE packages too.