On Tue, 1 Jun 1999, Pollywog wrote: > > On 01-Jun-99 Brad wrote: > > The same thing happened to me. It appears that in the latest shellutils > > package, someone forgot to mark that su should be suid root (or sgid > > shadow when using shadow passwords). > > I did not know it had to be gid root. My laptop has /bin/su suid root and > both use shadow passwords. I did install the newest shellutils today.
It doesn't, actually. It's just that the /etc/shadow is owned by group shadow by default, so you could get by with su not suid root but sgid shadow instead. Of you don't use shadow passwords, then it wouldn't work (which is likely why it's suid root in Debian, so it'll work for most everyone)
