Chown ???

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Wed, 2009-04-08 at 15:21 +0100, Alan Cox wrote:
> > I was at BTL in the very early '80s.  Writing kernel mods and drivers
> > for Unix, and teaching Unix internals to BTL employees.  It's always been
> > "superuser".  I don't know where anyone got this lame "substitute user"
> > stuff, but it's not authentic.
> 
> To quote the V7 manual page
> 
> -su  \-  substitute user id temporarily
> 
> 
> So although a lot of people believe su is superuser, they are wrong. 

As I said already, 'su' *was* 'superuser', but it changed. My first Unix
system was 5th Edition, circa 1975, and I definitely remember it this
way. In fact that version of 'su' didn't even take an argument.

I can't find a 5th Edition manual on line, but the screenshot below is
from su(8) in the 6th Edition and corroborates what I'm saying.

Cheers

poc
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: su-v6.png
Type: image/png
Size: 17210 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://listman.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/attachments/20090408/f73b7360/attachment-0001.png>