On 26/03/2025 18:55, Greg Wooledge wrote:
"sudo -i" is meant to approximate the behavior of "su -". Before buster,
nobody would have used that on a Debian system. It's horrible. The
fact that people are now embracing it as a norm is even worse.
It seems I have to clarify why I suggested namely "sudo -i". It is
completely unrelated to e.g. PATH issues.
The context is live image boot. To recover installed system the user
needs root privileges to execute several commands. ~/.bashrc vs.
~/.profile difference is not significant.
sudo does not ask password in the case of live boot. It is not obvious
what users should type in the case of su password prompt.
Just "sudo" is not enough, something should be added. I do not consider
"sudo su" because they are tools created for rather similar purpose, so
combining them is a bizarre approach (and may attract haters of both tools).
"sudo -i" vs. "sudo -s" should not matter, but due to previous
experience I still prefer "sudo -i" or "sudo -H COMMAND". Approximately
a decade ago I noticed that new entries were not added to some history
file, I do not remember if it was .bash_history or for some other tool,
but the owner of the file was root. It was the reason why I decided to
use some option to set $HOME. Till yesterday I was not aware that it was
Ubuntu-specific behavior and that it was changed in 2019 (making some
users unhappy)
<https://askubuntu.com/questions/1186999/how-does-sudo-handle-home-differently-since-19-10>
(an extremely long and detailed answer). In Debian, sudo set HOME to the
target user for a long time, so "-i" is not really necessary and I have
nothing against "-s" anymore.
Actually I prefer to start root session in clean state. I consider cases
like "make install" mentioned in this thread as an exception that may
require a bit different treatment. I just have noticed that even su(1)
suggests:
It is recommended to always use the --login option
(instead of its shortcut -) to avoid side effects caused by
mixing environments.
Side note: you convinced me that "su -" is more portable
than "su --login"
Greg Wooledge. Re: Unexpected permission denied. Wed, 25 Jan 2023
23:04:51 -0500.
<https://lists.debian.org/msgid-search/y9h74zzdugha0...@wooledge.org>
(the main point that time was setpriv instead of su to drop privileges)
