On Sat, 2011-07-23 at 17:53 -0400, David A. De Graaf wrote: > As I understand it (from the golden years of UNIX), what happens when > I type /bin/su - dad is roughly this: > - the shell forks, creating a child with all of the parent's exported > environment but not the rest, and including stdin, stdout, and > stderr. RTFM. According to the info page on su: `-' `-l' `--login' Make the shell a login shell. This means the following. Unset all environment variables except `TERM', `HOME', and `SHELL' (which are set as described above), and `USER' and `LOGNAME' (which are set, even for the super-user, as described above), and set `PATH' to a compiled-in default value. Change to USER's home directory. Prepend `-' to the shell's name, intended to make it read its login startup file(s). When this option is given, /etc/pam.d/su-l PAM file is used instead of the default one. IOW the DISPLAY environment variable will not be passed to the child shell in this case. poc -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines