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Date: Mon, 9 Jan 2006 13:58:39 +0100
From: Corinna Vinschen <corinna-cygwin AT cygwin DOT com>
To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: Re: 'su' no longer working?
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On Jan  6 00:03, Igor Peshansky wrote:
> On Thu, 5 Jan 2006, Eric Blake wrote:
> > According to Igor Peshansky on 1/5/2006 3:37 PM:
> > > 'su' used to be an executable that worked correctly from a SYSTEM-owned
> > > shell, but now it's a shell script that simply prints a "not supported"
> > > message.  Is it possible to resurrect the old "su" executable (that
> > > perhaps prints the same message if run from a non-SYSTEM account)?
> >
> > Coreutils certainly builds an su executable, but the cygwin distro of su
> > has been a script since at least 5.2.1 when Corinna was the maintainer; I
> > only enhanced the script to be a little more useful.
> 
> Right.  In fact, Googling for "sysbash" unearthed this message:
> <http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2004-10/msg00900.html> (though Corinna did
> miss the one use for "su" that I mention below -- that is, switching user
> context without a password if unable to start a service).

You know the problem.  We had a good number of reports along the lines
of "su is broken".  That's the reason I replaced su with that script.

It's Eric's choice, but I wouldn't like to see su return to life without
some Windows specific changes.  If su fails to switch user context, then
it should print a WIndows specific message which points to the fact
that Administrator users don't have permissions to change user context
by default, plus basically the text printed by the current su script.
Otherwise the usual questions as above will crop up on this list again.


Corinna

-- 
Corinna Vinschen                  Please, send mails regarding Cygwin to
Cygwin Project Co-Leader          cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Red Hat


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