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Comment by ohazi | Hacker News Reader

> * My user account wasn't added to the sudo group by default, and using `su` broke something with PATH (/sbin wasn't in PATH after running `su`).

The default profile for users (/etc/profile) hasn't included sbin paths for the entire time that I've used Debian, which always seemed a little weird to me, since there are definitely binaries in there that normal users can still use (e.g. lsmod).

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Use `su -` to get the path you want.

I am aware that the normal user account does not include /sbin, but `su` not adding it to PATH is different from previous releases to my knowledge.

I am unsure of why this is the default behavior, however.

Simply `su` should not change the PATH; you have to start a login shell, as in `su -`.

Huh. I guess I just never noticed that... normally I do `sudo su`, which I believe does update PATH.

sudo tip: `sudo -i`!

Yeah, sudo su always annoys me: sudo -i if you want a login shell and sudo -s if you don’t (e.g. you cd-ed somewhere and forgot to become root, but don’t want to cd again because the path is long or you have done some complicated setup.

Sudo su -c 'command1|command2' makes sense if both commands need root but you want to stay normal user afterwards.

Then sudo bash -c '...'

"sudo su" is "launch su with superuser privileges", which is eh... weird to say the least. You probably wanted "sudo -i".

Yes, this is a change from Debian 9, due to Debian switching which implementation of 'su' it uses, moving to the one used by most other distributions. NEWS entry with details: https://sources.debian.org/src/util-linux/2.33.1-0.1/debian/...

Working link, since sources.debian.org seems to be having problems at the moment:

https://salsa.debian.org/debian/util-linux/blob/debian/2.33....

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