debian su – and su $PATH differences?
The two implementations are very similar but have some minor differences (and there might be more that was not yet noticed ofcourse), e.g.
root
Concern about logging in as root overrated?
For personal linux on my personal notebooks, I’ve usually set my environment to autologin as root even under X or lower runlevels. I’ve found my workflow is very pleasant and fast, without any cumbersome need to type su or sudo or being asked by keyring or auth or something.
How is sudo intended to be used?
I’ve tried configuring sudo before, but I haven’t had too much luck with it. How is it different from su -l -c "x"? It seems that via the configuration file, one can make it so a user can only have access to certain commands and more. I always thought of sudo as a way of one-lining a command as another user or group. Since distros like Ubuntu and Mint make it easy by essentially giving the main user easy access to root via a password, I’m not really sure what its intended use is.
Unable to delete file, even when running as root
I am in the process of migrating a machine from RHEL 4 to 5. Rather than actually do an upgrade we have created a new VM (both machines are in a cloud) and I am in the process of copying across data between the two.
Why doesn’t “sudo su” in a shell script run the rest of the script as root?
A sample script can be as below:
How far can you go with rm -rf / as root
If you are root, and you issue
How do I edit a file as root?
Are there any special considerations to editing a file as root? What is the safest way to do this?
Does a user have to log in to run a process and become its owner?
In general, does a user have to log in to run a process and become its owner (ruid, or euid)? Does this apply to any user or any non-root user?
For example:
Is it bad practice to set root’s shell to something other than the default?
Once a friend of mine (who is an experienced Unix/Linux user) told me that setting root’s shell to something other than sh (i.e bash or zsh) might create problems, because some script might assume that the shell is sh and do something weird.