From owner-freebsd-questions Wed Jan 5 23:41:13 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from ns1.sunesi.net (ns1.sunesi.net [196.15.192.194]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 4D48B155C6 for ; Wed, 5 Jan 2000 23:41:05 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from nbm@sunesi.net) Received: from nbm by ns1.sunesi.net with local (Exim 3.03 #1) id 1267XC-000Hbq-00; Thu, 06 Jan 2000 09:40:38 +0200 Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2000 09:40:38 +0200 From: Neil Blakey-Milner To: R Joseph Wright Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: window manager question Message-ID: <20000106094038.B66645@mithrandr.moria.org> References: <200001051806.TAA36854@dorifer.heim3.tu-clausthal.de> <3873A3EB.58082BFB@nwlink.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 1.0pre2i In-Reply-To: <3873A3EB.58082BFB@nwlink.com> Organization: Rhodes University Computer Users' Society X-Operating-System: FreeBSD 3.3-RELEASE i386 X-URL: http://rucus.ru.ac.za/~nbm/ Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Wed 2000-01-05 (12:04), R Joseph Wright wrote: > > For the above reasons (and because of "good practice"), I never > > change root's login shell. Instead, I use ``su -m'' (as a > > normal user) to become root, which causes my root shell to be > > the same as my normal user shell (which happens to be zsh). > > In fact, my ``su'' is an alias for ``su -m''. (nbm@ns1) /home/nbm> which su su: aliased to su -m > Does this mean that generally I should never login as root, even for > example when installing a new port? I should do su instead? If that's > the case, is there an rc file that I can use to get my su shell to > behave as my user shell? For example, I like for the prompt to show my > user name and current working directory. I can't say I log in as root at all often - I almost always su. My shell setup changes my prompt from ">" to "#" automatically, and that's about the only difference, because 'su -m' preserves your environment. Whether this is good practise or not, I don't know. It's almost entirely required in most situations I'm in - I used to sysadmin a largish student server which I almost never saw, and even less logged in on console. Now I have 5 or so servers around me, with the same situation. By now the difference between console and network logins are lost to me. Neil -- Neil Blakey-Milner nbm@rucus.ru.ac.za To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message