Re: man page update for 'su'

[Bob Proulx]

Dairenn Lombard wrote:
> Thanks for going into such informative depth in your response.  Here is the
> output of our sh:
> 
> # su --version
> su (GNU sh-utils) 2.0.11
> Written by David MacKenzie.
> [...]
> I checked just in case for some strange reason, we got the man page for the
> GNU su but were running something else in actuality.

All well and good.  So often people are using a different version.
Thanks for checking.

However, sh-utils is rather old.  It has been merged into coreutils.
You might like to try the newer code.

STABLE
  ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-5.0.tar.gz
  ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-5.0.tar.bz2
  (coreutils is the union of fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils)

BETA
  ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-5.0.91.tar.gz
  ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-5.0.91.tar.bz2

> Now that I think about it, yeah: if su is using the presiding authentication
> method on a system (such as PAM in my case), it could be that PAM required
> the 'wheel' group membership.  I will read up on PAM's documentation to see
> how clearly someone could make the connection that in order for PAM to allow
> su-type functions, a user has to be in 'wheel'.  It didn't occur to me that
> su was dependant on PAM but now that I think of it, anything authenticating
> with the UNIX password files would need PAM or whatever else the OS was
> using.

If you have contributions or patches for the documentation please
suggest them.  Much of the documentation needs improvement and would
benefit from help.

Bob