Re: "su -" strange behaviour on Solaris 9

[Bob Proulx]

Art Vandalay wrote:
> If I use the stock 'su' that ships with Solaris 9, doing the command "su -"
> behaves as per normal.
> ...
> Okay, no problem there. Looks normal. However, if I grab any version of
> coreutils and recompile 'su' and use the newly compiled 'su', when I do "su
> -" with this new 'su', it doesn't seem to get any of root's profile stuff
> sourced properly. The thing I'm most concerned with is $PATH being
> incorrect.

The GNU su is host specific enough that there has been discussion of
removing it from coreutils and moving it into a hostutils package.

Because this is so host specific, on legacy unix hosts it does not
usually get used.  Therefore there is less testing of it there.
Personally I do not include it on an HP-UX port that I maintain.

> If anyone has ideas on *anything* i can try, that would be most
> appreciated.

What I do and what I recommend is that you avoid these listed
utilities on your platform and use the native ones on your platform.

  false hostname logname pinky sync true uptime users who

> I realize the version of 'su' on Solaris 9 is far older than 5.2.1, but did
> Sun modify 'su', or is their weird interaction with 'su' on Solaris 9 that
> i'm not aware of?

Because the GNU su is a completely different code base from the
Solaris su the concept of older or newer really does not apply
directly to it.  They are not related.

Bob