SU VS SUDO PASSWORD

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. If a user has the root password, they can obtain root anytime.

SU VS SUDO PASSWORD

Because su is invoked by root, it does not require you to enter the target user's password. From a security perspective, it is much better to assign users sudoer privileges to access the root shell rather than passing around a root password that users can use through su root. 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. However, in the case that the SHELL environment variable is set in the invoking user's environment (which it usually is, and it is typically /bin/bash), and that the target user has a login shell which differs from this (such as /usr/sbin/nologin), there is then a difference between which shell gets executed by these two commands, and this is what you are seeing.The main difference between these commands is in the way they restrict access to their functions. So the two commands look similar (largely coincidentally) and have a somewhat similar effect when the target user has the same login shell as that of the invoking user. The su user command could be run without the use of sudo, but by running it as root it will not require the password of the target user. The su command will then invoke the login shell of the specified username. Sudo su user will use sudo to run the command su user as the root user. These options are documented under man sudo. The -u user option means to run the command as the specified user rather than root. The -s option means to run the shell specified in the environment variable SHELL if this has been set, or else the user's login shell. Sudo -su user is short for sudo -s -u user.

Su vs sudo