On Sat, Mar 27, 1999 at 11:35:07PM +0000, Lev Lvovsky wrote: > > right, I usually use 'su' w/o the user specified, as I normally wanna get > root priveleges...problem is, my PATH's aren't set. With RH, you could do > an 'su -l', and get the PATH of the user you were switching to. Is there > a switch for this in the debian 'su'?
You can use the the "-" option, as in "su -", to get a similar effect. This causes the your new session to use through the new user's startup files (.bash_profile, etc). This will give you any environment settings (including PATH), as well as aliases, that they would normally have set. If what you're wanting is to inherit only the PATH, then I'm not aware of a similar option...
