Haines Brown wrote:
But regularly, we, running as user, find that we need to do something that requires root's privileges, and so we "su - root".
. . .
I presume every debian user who is both user and administrator of his machine (probably the majority) will occasionally want to su to become root (I assume everyone does that regularly).
Colin Watson wrote:
However, 'su - root' is fine if you're just doing regular command-line administration. (I'd use 'sudo' because I prefer to run commands only one at a time as root rather than starting an interactive root shell, but to each their own.)
I echo Colin's thought. Forget about "su" and use "sudo". It takes an extra 5 keystrokes per command, but it "just works", and in my opinion is better than forgetting you're root and doing something you don't want to do.
apt-get install sudo visudo, add yourself a line similar to what's already there sudo command_to_be_run_as_root -- Kent