On Friday 15 July 2005 12:06, Mike McCarty wrote: > 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. The main reason for most unix admins to use 'su -' is that it sets the environment... Some people put nasty things like "." into their path or do other things that might break stuff - LD_LIBRARY_PATH, ... there is tons of things that you usually don't want in the environment of the root user. Hence you use the dash and get rid of all of that... A long long time ago I actually remember discussions of switching the behavior of su to default to "su -" and having an additional switch for it to _not_ give you a login shell - all that simply because su without the dash can be such a nightmare... Peter.
