On Thursday 11 May 2006 18:47, "Michael J. Knox" <michael(a)knox.net.nz>
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.
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