On Sun, Feb 28, 2010 at 12:52:01PM -0700, Denis Dupeyron wrote: > Some systems are configured with a random root password. After a while > you get tired of doing 'sudo <command>' all the time and would like to > become root but you can't because you don't know the root password. > One way around that is 'sudo su -' which allows to become root using > your user password. Actually, by default, sudo command uses your user password (it does here anyway), and su - uses the root password. afaik sudo can be configured to require the root password in the sudoers file, but it doesn't by default. To test it, run this as a user:
sudo -i That should ask for a password. Try your user password there. Once you authenticate, you will be put in a shell with root's environment. On the other hand, "su -" requires the root password and does the same thing as "sudo -i". In affect, when you run "sudo su -" what you are doing is running sudo and authenticating to it. Then you are running "su -" as the command you want sudo to run as root. William
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