Things look quiet here. But I've been doing a lot of blogging at
dan.langille.org because I prefer WordPress now.
Not all my posts there are FreeBSD related.
I am in the midst of migrating The FreeBSD Diary over to WordPress
(and you can read about that here).
Once the migration is completed, I'll move the FreeBSD posts into the
new FreeBSD Diary website.
su - how to become a super user. avoid using root18 October 1998
If you're like most people new to Unix, you do everything as root. You
shouldn't. I know I don't follow my own advice, but I'm trying to improve.
Create
yourself another account. Use that instead of root. Unless you really need
root. You can always invoke su to become a super user. That way,
you don't have to log out and back in every time you need the power.
wheel
Only users in the wheel group can run su. The group can be
specified when creating a user via adduser. To add a user manuall, just
put the name of the user at the end of the line in /etc/group. For
example:
wheel:*:0:root,marc
This adds the user marc to the wheel group.
su
To become super user, you do this:
bash-2.02$ su
Password:
su-2.02#
At the password prompt, supply the root password.
Note that you might also want to use either the -l or the -m
options. Respectively, these options will simulate a full login or leave the
environment unmodified. see man
su for details.
