Another useful feature of the su command is the ability to switch to a different user with login shell.Once you’ve entered the correct password, you will be logged in as “john”. This will prompt you to enter the password for the user “john”. Suppose you have a user named “john” and you want to switch to his account.Let’s take a look at some examples of the `su` command in action. Once you’ve entered the correct password, you will be logged in as a new user. This will prompt you for the password of the user you are trying to switch to. The root environment is far less likely to be poisoned with malware, such as a rogue line in.The visual reminder that you are in a 'root' session.Though sudo -s is convenient for giving you the environment that you are familiar with, I recommend the use of sudo -i for two reasons: Note also that the Bash prompt changes as will with sudo -i but not with sudo -s: ls which sudo which sudo -s Here is an example, you can see that I have an application lsl in my ~/.bin/ directory which is accessible via sudo -s but not accessible with sudo -i. sudo -s gives you the user's environment, so your ~/.bashrc is respected.sudo -i gives you the root environment, i.e.The major difference between sudo -i and sudo -s is: This answer is a dupe of my answer on a dupe of this question, put here on the canonical answer so that people can find it! So, sudo su allows you to open a shell as another user (including root), if you're allowed super-user access by the /etc/sudoers file. Because su is invoked by root, it does not require you to enter the target user's password. The often-used sudo su combination works as follows: first sudo asks you for your password, and, if you're allowed to do so, invokes the next command ( su) as a super-user. user X is only able to run program Y etc. it's not possible to login as root directly.Īlso, /etc/sudoers allows to specify some additional options - i.e. This results in much cleaner management of privileges.Īs a result of this, in many Debian-based systems root user has no password set - i.e. To revoke admin privileges from a person, you just need to edit the config file (or remove the user from a group which is listed in that config).

It uses a config file (/etc/sudoers) which lists which users have rights to specific actions (run commands as root, etc.) When invoked, it asks for the password of the user who started it - to ensure the person at the terminal is really the same 'joe' who's listed in /etc/sudoers. what's the mnemonic? Super-User-DO?) is completely different. If you need to revoke admin permissions from one of the users, you need to change root password and tell it only to those people who need to keep access - messy. If there are several users on your machine who need to run commands as root, they all need to know root password - note that it'll be the same password. So, to become root, you need to know root password. To ensure you have the rights to do that, it asks you for the password of the target user. Su (which means 'substitute user' or 'switch user') - does exactly that, it starts another shell instance with privileges of the target user. The main difference between these commands is in the way they restrict access to their functions.

Get out of sudo su