I see.

Yes, my use of su is rather limited to the basics, so I really have quite a bit of reading to do.
That's what you get from arriving to Linuxland late in life.  8^7

Thanks for your input.

Cheers,

A.

Why not just get rid of the old su and let the output be command not found?

Because su can be used for things other than obtaining a root shell. Read man su

I see.

Of course it is.
su won't work as intended expected without it.

Q:
Why not just get rid of the old su and let the output be command not found?

Now we have sudo, su and su - ...

Thanks for the link.

Yes.
I forget to do it because I am very much used to su.
And I don't like sudo although it is convenient if properly used/configured.

Cheers,

A.

I did not have /etc/default/su and generating the file and adding ALWAYS SET PATH  yes did not work.

That seems to be an error in the release notes, ALWAYS_SET_PATH yes should be added to /etc/login.defs.

Or just call su correctly:

su -

^ The - is important

See https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugrepo … bug=905409

tl;dr: /bin/su used to be supplied by the login package but it is now supplied by the util-linux package.

And is it really such a PITA to add a - after the command?

I did not have /etc/default/su and generating the file and adding ALWAYS SET PATH  yes did not work.

What did work was ...

root@devuan2:/home/groucho# export PATH=$PATH:~/usr/local/sbin

root@devuan2:/home/groucho# $echo $PATH
bash: /usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/root/usr/local/sbin: No such file or directory
root@devuan2:/home/groucho# 

Got it from https://wiki.debian.org/EnvironmentVariables:

--- snip ---
... after doing su, your PATH may not contain directories like /sbin, and many system administration commands will fail. There are several workarounds:
...

Put the system administration directories (/sbin, /usr/sbin, /usr/local/sbin) in your regular account's PATH (see EnvironmentVariables for help with this).

--- snip ---

BTW: whatever the reason for the change in how su works, I hope it is a good/justified one and not another one of Poettering's wet dreams. It is a PITA.

A.

rolfie

This is surely a bug?

It means you cannot run fdisk etc.