On Lu, 15 iul 19, 10:20:34, Greg Wooledge wrote: > > The implementation of su in stretch-and-earlier is the best of all worlds. > You get PATH set correctly before and after, you get to keep all of your > customized environment settings like $PAGER and $LESS, and it doesn't > change your working directory in the middle of your workflow.
It's probably not affecting me because of a different workflow.
> What are the replacement choices?
>
> * "su -" throws away your custom environment AND changes your working
> directory.
>
> * "sudo -i" throws away your custom environment AND changes your working
> directory.
>
> * "sudo -s" throws away most of your custom environment (unless configured
> in a non-default way).
>
> * Putting /usr/local/sbin (et al.) in your regular PATH and using "su"
> lets you keep your custom environment and your working directory, at
> the cost of inefficiency when you're not root. This may be extremely
> difficult with some Display Managers.
>
> * Putting ALWAYS_SET_PATH yes in /etc/login.defs lets you keep your
> customized enviornment and your working directory, without imposing
> an extra cost when you're not root.
>
> Objectively, the last one is the best choice, but I have *just* enough
> inertia that I don't really want to do that... so I've settled for sudo -s.
> For now, anyway. I reserve the right to change my mind and do something
> else if I get sufficiently annoyed.
Let me suggest an alternative workflow:
* Do everything from a user account, except for the (very few) actions
that actually require elevated privileges.
Looking up man pages, retrieving package information, check networking
info[1], etc. is only ever done from the user account. I switch to root
only when I need to do apt update/upgrade/install/etc., edit
configuration files, restart daemons/system, etc.
This has the nice (for me) side effect that the root environment
requires very little (if any) customization[2] as all customizations I
really care about are done for my user account.
In practice I'm doing this with screen configured to always start a user
shell and a root shell (using sudo -i). This also provides me with a
consistent environment, regardless if I'm logged in locally or via ssh.
[1] iproute2 (i.e. ip and friends) have been a major improvement for my
workflow in this regard, in addition to being shorter to type ;)
[2] currently the only customization I need for root is
'update-alternatives --config editor', which is useful for the user
account as well ;) It also helps that vim in its default configuration
has enough advanced features for my use.
Kind regards,
Andrei
--
http://wiki.debian.org/FAQsFromDebianUser
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