Hi, Christian Weisgerber wrote on Thu, Jun 13, 2019 at 11:13:11AM -0000: > On 2019-06-13, "Theo de Raadt" <[email protected]> wrote: >> Somebody wrote:
>>> I always considered that su is coming from _s_uper _u_ser. But maybe I >>> am wrong, I am not from old UNIX days. >> incorrect. >> >> NAME >> su - substitute user identity > Well, that's V7, which appears to have engaged in a bit of revisionism > together with the then newly expanded functionality. > > Earlier in V6 it was "su - become privileged user" and "Su allows > one to become the super-user, who has all sorts of marvelous (and > correspondingly dangerous) powers". > > http://man.cat-v.org/unix-6th/8/su Actually, that text (without the parenthetic remark) goes back all the way to v1 (Nov/3/71), To scare you a bit, the SYNOPSIS in v1 said: su password and the DESCRIPTION: In order for su to do its magic, the user must pass as an argument a password. There was a BUGS section, but it was explicitly empty. Those were more carefree times. The table of contents in v2 even said, under section I: su ........... become super-user https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/Research/Dennis_v1/man13.pdf https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/Research/1972_stuff/unix_2nd_edition_manual.pdf I just committed a fix to the HISTORY section of the manual page. CVSROOT: /cvs Module name: src Changes by: [email protected] 2019/06/13 06:59:51 Modified files: usr.bin/su : su.1 Log message: su(I) goes back all the way to v1: https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/Research/Dennis_v1/man13.pdf It wasn't in v0 PDP-7 UNIX though: https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/Research/McIlroy_v0/UnixEditionZero.txt Index: su.1 =================================================================== RCS file: /cvs/src/usr.bin/su/su.1,v retrieving revision 1.32 retrieving revision 1.33 diff -u -r1.32 -r1.33 --- su.1 12 Jun 2019 08:29:17 -0000 1.32 +++ su.1 13 Jun 2019 12:59:51 -0000 1.33 @@ -273,7 +273,7 @@ .Sh HISTORY A .Nm -command appeared in -.At v7 . +command first appeared in +.At v1 . .Sh BUGS The login name is not optional for root if there are shell arguments.
