Quote:
Originally Posted by transhour
there you happy? you gone and done it, you have confused me 
so originally su meant "super user"...then at some point some one created su for linux, and made it mean "subshell", then at some point, it was easier to explain "su" as being "switch user" or "substitute user", cause it is just easier to explain the process that way than explaining subshell...
to me, regardless of what it started out as, or what it means, it still boils down to how we use it:
i use su to switch between various users in a persistent manner, and i use sudo to "gain" temp root privileges. (if i have sudo installed or enabled at all.)
for GUI programs if i need them, since i use kde, i use kdesu to run them, as going to su, and then trying to run a graphical program, throws an error how it can't connect to xorg...
oh well, back to coffee for me hehe. |
No, SuperUser was the intention. It was ment to give you root access in a terminal because I'm guessing they didn't have it implemented so that you could login as a different user. If you used a new TTYL, like when booting CLI and hitting Alt+F1 or Alt+F2, that you could login as a new user. The problem comes into play when you login as a user into a graphical environment and cannot login as another user. You create SU so that the user doesn't have to be logged in as root to interact with the system and change Admin settings. You couldn't run a terminal and go "login root" in GUI, so what do you do? SU! Why would you need to login as a different user? I mean honestly, why? When you can be root you can do what they can do, if file permissions needed to be re-set you just set them.
[edit] If you think about it, running a system with users (back then) ment that the admins gave the users privacy. It's something we don't really think about today, but user accounts should be left alone. If you want to set something up you should do it as an admin so they can access the files and do the work themselves.
[edit2] You also have the problem of doing remote logins, you could only log in once per session. That wasn't because the system didn't allow you, but terminal access doesn't let you:
Code:
mrshroom@173-18-215-75:~$ login root
login: Cannot possibly work without effective root
mrshroom@173-18-215-75:~$
Simply put, once you are in a session you can't get into another session as user. SU lets you do this, but the intention wasn't to log in as other users (just log out and back in) but to let admins become a user and still have a way to be an admin. Making extensive groups and policies puts security at risk. The next step to this was to let admins be admins without logging in as root, single command operations ran by SUDO.
[edit, no the last one] SwitchUser, or at least the ability to Switch User wasn't added until way later. You don't make a command, name it, and then re-name it. SU doesn't become SwitchUser because it gets the ability, it's still SuperUser but with new additions. VI didn't change, that's not how it works. However people find out it can Switch Users and then think "oh, switch user (SU)" and write it into their tutorials. As tutorials get popularized and used more and more people use the term. The new term goes into mainstream and the old term gets forgotten, however that doesn't mean SU was ment to be SwitchUser. It's original intentions were to be ROOT, that's it.
Edited by mushroomboy - 3/9/11 at 3:55pm
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lol
