A historical curiosity in su(1)

[Glen Barber]

On Tue, Mar 21, 2017 at 04:12:23PM -0700, Rodney W. Grimes wrote:
> > Jumping back to the point I made in the talk, the result of getlogin can often
> > be surprising. For example, a daemon restarted by a supervisor (e.g. upstart)
> > will be associated with the user that issued the restart (i.e. getlogin would
> > return "chris" if I restarted it, rather than something like "daemon-user"). Any
> > daemon that calls su will run into this behaviour.
> 
> su - should resolve that behavior.
> 

For clarification with special characters, this is 'su -', which indeed
does resolve the behavior described.  From the su(1) manual page:

     su -l foo
            Simulate a login for user foo.
     su - foo
            Same as above.
     su -   Simulate a login for root.

Glen

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