how do I set 'home' for root

Rick Stevens rstevens at vitalstream.com
Wed Apr 27 20:10:45 UTC 2005


Claude Jones wrote:
> It's a long story, but I have pretty crippled system right now, including a 
> messed up root user. 
> When I su in a Bash terminal, instead of getting my usual prompt I get 
> something quite different, and if I try to run a command, it aborts with an 
> error like this:
> 
> cj at viewridgeproductions2 misc]$ su
> Password:
> sh-3.00# kcontrol
> Aborting. $HOME is not set.
> sh-3.00#
> 
> So root is lost - can someone help me tell it how to 'phone home'? I was 
> wondering why I was getting the strange 'sh-3.00#' prompt in the third line 
> where I used to get 'root at viewridgeproductions2 ]$'  I think lines 4 and 5 
> are my clue, but I don't how to fix this, or for that matter, how it got into 
> this state. 

"su" only changes the process' effective UID, but doesn't give you
root's environment.  "su -" DOES give you root's environment (including
root's path and, yes, $HOME).  It's equivalent to logging in as root.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
-                                                                    -
-   To understand recursion, you must first understand recursion.    -
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