Intro to SuperUser ... [Re: sound and yup]

[Ken Schweigert]

Bob,

"With great power comes great responsibility."  - Uncle Ben, Spiderman

su, sudo, and "superuser terminal" are all just different methods for
accomplishing the same thing; running a program as a different user
than the one you're logged in as.

"superuser terminal" - I'm assuming you mean that you exit from your
session and go back to the login prompt and login as root and with
root's password.  root is the omnipotent account on your system, it
is all powerful and has full reign over what happens on your system.

su - short for "switch user" is used to assume the identity of another
user on the system, provided you know their password.  Probably the
most common use of su is to switch to the root user, probably to 
install a rpm of look at a system log file.  A common mistake when
switching users is to forget the hypen in the command line.  This 
hyphen brings over that user's environment variables, as well as
allowing you to execute programs as that user.  This is important
because root's path is usually different from every other user on
the system.  So you should use "su -" instead of just "su".

sudo - short for "switch user and do [a command]" allows the root
user to set up a list of commands that other users can execute as
if they were the root user.  The beauty of sudo is that the root
password does not have to be given out to the users, thus greatly
improving the security of the system.  At my workstation, I do
some php and perl cgi programming and need to have Apache running
to test the scripts.  With sudo set up, all I need to do is:
   [ken@byteme ken] sudo /usr/local/apache/bin/apachectl start
   Password:  <my login password>
and Apache is running.

I hope this helps.
-- 
-Ken Schweigert, Padawan Network Administrator
Byte Productions, LLC
http://www.byte-productions.com

On Sun, May 26, 2002 at 09:26:27PM -0400, robert nuzum wrote:
> Forget my previous request for help. I found  how to start yup (needed to use 
> the superuser  terminal, of course). what  is the difference between using  
> su or sudo and the  superuser terminal? Wouln't work with su or sudo.
> thanks for your  help, Bob
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