Su VS sudo su VS sudo -u -i

"With no extra arguments, as far as I can tell su &#60;username&#62; is exactly the same as attempting to login remotely as that user,"<p>This is not correct. su does not change the ownership of the pts (tty), so for example you can not run screen after doing that.<p>I actually have no idea how to change to a different user and also setup the pts properly, so I've resorted to telneting to localhost when I need to do that.

su is unnecessary; <i>sudo -s</i> is equivalent to <i>sudo su</i>, but allows the admin to restrict who may sudo to whom, for which programs, and so on.

I always do<p><pre><code> $ sudo su - # root $ sudo su - username # user $ man su -, -l, --login make the shell a login shell</code></pre>

Completely missing the different aspects of logging each different invocation may have.

people still writing stuff and getting upvotes without bothering to RTFM to the slightest.<p>man sudo<p>=&#62; sudo -s<p>hard uh. always read the f. man damnit. you know, that's what RTFM means.

I use <i>sudo su - &#60;username&#62;</i> pretty regularly when I'm working on servers. I have a dev box where I do initial deploys of all of my apps, and each app has a different username with different configurations to run/debug the app.<p><i>sudo su - &#60;username&#62;</i> takes me to the homefolder of the user and allows me to switch without remembering the password for all of the different users. If I need to do some system-level operation, I open a new tab and run the superuser there.

I'm not a sudoer on any box i administrate, and i've apt-get remove'd it from my personal VPSes. It's a little worrying, occasionally you'll run across a shell script that runs sudo for half it's lines and you're not entirely sure why.<p>Using plain su instead of sudo &#60;command&#62; forces me to enter my password, thereby encouraging a concious decision about whether a command needs to be run as root, and the change in prompt is another reminder to be careful.

&#62; The only use that I can see for this is, as a system administrator, debugging issues that are user specific. So far, I have not needed it.<p>I use `sudo -i` daily, but when doing things that would require things to be in root's path (eg `service` on RHEL envs).

Real men <i>su -</i> and that's it.

Forgot vs root.