/sbin not in path in su?
Preston Crawford
me at prestoncrawford.com
Tue Dec 16 16:23:59 UTC 2003
On Tue, 2003-12-16 at 08:11, Mike Evans wrote:
> Sorry if this has been covered... I'm new to the list and the search
> function in the archives is non-op. After a brand new install of Fedora
> Core 1 on my Thinkpad R40, I was trying to compile some drivers and
> noticed that all the errors and warnings that cropped up were related to
> the script not being able to find "ifconfig"
>
> Since ifconfig is in /sbin and I was su, why wouldn't /sbin be in my
> PATH? I'm not only confused about that, but how to remedy the
> situation. Thanks for the help.
The problem is that Red Hat/Fedora behave differently when su-ing to
root. When you go "su root" you don't get the same path as when you "su
-". I believe this is intentional, trying to force you to use what is
general considered "safer", that being to "su -" as opposed to root. The
reason for this, I think, being that if you su - you are thrown back
into the /root directory. This way you don't accidentally muck up an
important directory you may be at the time by accidentally deleting
something.
Preston
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