Re: bash login for root

[Krzys Majewski <krzys@cs.mcgill.ca>]

Bob Nielsen <nielsen@oz.net> writes:

> I use sudo, logged in as a regular user.  It's generally considered a
> security risk to be logged in as root, and a bit less of a risk to use
> sudo or fakeroot. 

Aha. I only started using sudo seriously about an hour ago. 

> Funny, but 'sudo echo $PATH' gives the $PATH of the user, but 'sudo
> whoami' says root.  

Hm, that's not *that* surprising, is it? The first one says, 
"run the  'echo' command  as if you  were root" (presumably  the $PATH
part gets expanded before the call to sudo). The second one says, "run
the 'whoami' command is if you were root", and works as expected. 

> sudo does access the binaries in /usr/sbin, which
> are not in the user's $PATH.
> 

Really? My PATH is something like this:

/home/krzys/shell:.:/sbin:/usr/sbin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/bin/X11:/usr/games

(Come  to think of  it this  makes no  sense, neither  /etc/profile nor
~/.bashrc set the  path quite like this, but anyway.) Is  it a bad idea
to have  /usr/sbin/ in one's path?  For things like  /sbin/halt I give
the following permissions:
-rwsr-xr--    1 root     admin        7796 Jun 25 05:23 halt*

-chris