David Gavin wrote:
On Fri, July 15, 2005 12:33, Rick Stevens said:
Mike McCarty wrote:
Paul Howarth wrote:
Mike McCarty wrote:
I have a general *NIX admin question. Why does one want to use
su -
as opposed to just su? I think I understand the difference in regards
to "su -" actually changes you to root, as if logged in that way, as
opposed to simply granting root privilege. But why do that? If I do
that, then I lose my path settings, and can't run my normal editor,
which
is in ~/bin and so on. I just use "su".
What am I missing?
You're missing getting /sbin and /usr/sbin on your PATH, which you
probably want for what you're about to do as root. If you already have
those directories on your regular user's PATH (which is not the
default), "su -" probably doesn't help you much. But it does for most
people.
Paul.
Hmm. So I give up my regular editor in return for not having to type
/sbin/
Well, I think I'll go along the way I am. I'm a pretty good typist.
I thought there might be a *real* reason, and I had missed something. I
was wondering if there might be some subtle problems which would bite
me later.
Actually, "su" will give you root's UID and GID, but not root's
_environment_ (path and such). "su -" is roughly equivalent to doing
a full-on login as root, and thus getting not only the UID and GID, but
the environment as well.
See "man su" for details.
<SNIP>
"su -" also repositions you into root's home directory, which may not be
what you wanted.
Correct. I assumed (probably a bad idea) that my "...login as root"
comment would infer that and that the reader would understand.
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- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer rstevens@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx -
- VitalStream, Inc. http://www.vitalstream.com -
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- Time: Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once. -
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