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Comment by mid-kid | Hacker News Reader

Sudo's -i option is able to provide you with a shell in the same state that it'd be if it were a fresh login. I've burned this into my fingers a long time ago. Also, in most configurations you have to specifically whitelist environment variables for them to surivive a "sudo" call.

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Is there another way of opening a root shell other than "sudo -i"? That's what I've been using for a decade. How do other people do it?

    sudo su -

Which also resets your environment and everything.

su -l root

But that only works if theres a password on root, which is generally seen as ill advised. But was how every distro did it in the olden days before there was a sudo group.

I've always used sudo -s but no clue why.

`sudo su` is a way.

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