Wandering Thoughts: Recent Entries For 2006/02/21

An annoyance with $PATH on Red Hat

In the spirit of equal opportunity annoyance:

One of the things that never fails to irritate me with Red Hat is that when you do '/bin/su root' on a stock system, you get a shell whose $PATH doesn't include /sbin or /usr/sbin.

This trips me up all the time, and every time it's an nngh moment. And it's not as if Red Hat doesn't already have a ~root/.bashrc that does quite a lot, so they could perfectly well also have it fix up $PATH to have everything it would if you just logged in as root.

(Yes, yes, 'use sudo'. Frankly, no; if I'm starting up a general root shell, I'm going to be honest about it. And I don't like 'su - root', because that has other effects.)

On my own systems, I've long since customized root's .bashrc so that when I su, it switches to my preferred shell; other bits then insure that I get a sensible root environment (including sanitizing $PATH). This may be evil, but it is convenient.

(There's an argument that Red Hat's default root .bashrc is already evil since it aliases cp, mv, and rm to their -i forms, but I'm not going to go there. Especially since I do it myself.)

Sidebar: a pop usage conundrum

In the above, is the right usage 'a nngh moment' or 'an nngh moment'?