5
3
I thought that using su as a regular user made you root temporarily, but encountered an issue where I get "bash: usermod: command not found" when I try to perform a usermod with su, whereas the command definitely exists when I log in as root.
Are super user and root different things? If so, what limitations should I be aware of?
3sudo is there to protect you from yourself as it is too easy to make mistakes running as root. I've been a unix-head since way before sudo, never make an
rm
I didn't mean, and still use sudo in preference to a root shell. Typing 4 characters, a space, and sometimes my user password requires far more awareness of root privilege than having#
as a shell prompt. – msw – 2010-07-06T22:07:41.0631@msw: true, but sometimes
sudo
is unnecessarily inconvenient, e.g. when you're going to be running a series of commands asroot
or you want to take advantage of filename completion inrwx------
directories, or something like that. What I do is set the root shell prompt to display in red and my regular user's shell prompt to display in green. Works great and it's pretty too ;-) (and I do usually usesudo
too) – David Z – 2010-07-07T04:11:45.017