Cue to Su -

[David Curry]

Thanks, Paul, for the cue on "su - " that you provided in response to 
Duncan Lithgow's question re - Used swap 0MB.

On encountering the PATH problems in attempting to tweak several issues, 
I have been logging off the system under my username and logging on as 
root to deal with the matter(s).  Using su - is clearly much simpler.

Paul Howarth wrote:

> Duncan Lithgow wrote:
>
>> Paul Howarth wrote:
>>
>>> Duncan Lithgow wrote:
>>>
>>>> Neither swapon nor mkswap are recognised by my bash terminal. I get 
>>>> a lot of that trying to follow what people suggest - is something 
>>>> wrong with that too!?
>>>
>>>
>>> You've probably got the wrong PATH setting, by using "su" to become 
>>> root instead of "su -".
>>>
>> thanks, i've always used
>>  >>su root
>> what is
>>  >>su -
>
>
> The "-" parameter makes su run as a login shell, so it sets up the 
> environment as if you had logged in as root, including adding /sbin 
> and /usr/sbin to the PATH environment variable.
>
>> It didn't help though. I get
>>
>>> [root at 3e6b347a dulithgow]# su -
>>> [root at 3e6b347a ~]# swapon -s
>>> [root at 3e6b347a ~]# mkswap /dev/hda6
>>> /dev/hda6: No such file or directory
>>> [root at 3e6b347a ~]#
>>
>
> Your swap partition is probably somewhere else then. What's the output 
> of "fdisk -l /dev/hda"?
>
> Paul.
>