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Date: Mon, 9 Jan 2006 08:04:30 -0500 (EST)
From: Igor Peshansky <pechtcha AT cs DOT nyu DOT edu>
Reply-To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: Re: 'su' no longer working?
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On Mon, 9 Jan 2006, Corinna Vinschen wrote:

> 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.

Right, that's pretty much what I was asking for above.  Eric, if it helps,
I can look into submitting the patch later this week, though I haven't
looked at the coreutils code in a while, so it might take some time to
understand the specifics.
	Igor
-- 
				http://cs.nyu.edu/~pechtcha/
      |\      _,,,---,,_	    pechtcha AT cs DOT nyu DOT edu | igor AT watson DOT ibm DOT com
ZZZzz /,`.-'`'    -.  ;-;;,_		Igor Peshansky, Ph.D. (name changed!)
     |,4-  ) )-,_. ,\ (  `'-'		old name: Igor Pechtchanski
    '---''(_/--'  `-'\_) fL	a.k.a JaguaR-R-R-r-r-r-.-.-.  Meow!

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that!" -- Rostand, "Cyrano de Bergerac"


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