On Thursday 11 May 2006 18:47, "Michael J. Knox" <michael@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Chitlesh GOORAH wrote: > > Hello here, > > Last time at LinuxTag Wiesbaden, someone asked me why in RedHat/Fedora > > distros, > > /sbin is not in the PATH for _su_ > > example ifconfig > > but as _su -_, /sbin is in the PATH? > > > > He also pointed out that in other distros like Mandriva and Suse it is > > not the case. > > > > Can anyone answer this so that I could document myself :) > > > > regards, > > Chitlesh Goorah > > su - takes the root user's enviroment varibles, su by itself does not. > When you call just su, your (mortal users) enviroment varibles are used. > > Thats my understanding. > > Michael I've not looked, but it is likely that those other distributions include /sbin in the default PATH for regular users, which is the real cause of the different behavior on those systems. 'su' and 'su -' actually behave the same on those systems, but 'su' would inherit only the user's PATH settings, so /sbin would be available only if it is in the user's PATH, which it is not the default on Fedora. 'su -', which creates a login shell, would use only root's PATH, which includes /sbin by default on Fedora. The tools in /sbin, /usr/sbin and /usr/local/sbin are generally intended for use by root, so it makes sense to exclude those paths for regular users. As a side note, the same truths apply to sudo. Simple use of sudo to specify a command will require an absolute path, while 'sudo bash --login' will create a login shell and will provide /sbin in the PATH environment variable. If a user prefers to have /sbin included in the PATH variable for regular users, the adjustment can be made in ~/.bash_profile for each user or system-wide by adding a new script in /etc/profile.d/ with lines that appear as: pathmunge /sbin pathmunge /usr/sbin pathmunge /usr/local/sbin You can find the lines that provide the default behavior in /etc/profile. For the sake of maintainability, you should not modify that file, but you can override or extend it instead using the above outlined methods. -- Patrick "The N-Man" Barnes nman64@xxxxxxxxx http://www.n-man.com/ LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/nman64 Have I been helpful? Rate my assistance! http://rate.affero.net/nman64/ --
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