su or sudo su?

[Tim]

On Mon, 2010-10-18 at 09:40 -0700, James Mckenzie wrote:
> Also root's home directory should NEVER be / (root) but rather
> something like /home/root.

Wrong.  Bad advice.  The following somewhat mitigates that, but you've
muddied the water with bad advice in the first place.

> I've known of several folks who 'forgot' they were root or had either
> sudo'd or su -'d and then issued the famous (or infamous) rm -rf * 
> wiping out the system or at least destroying critical files.

It's fine for root to have /root as the home space.  So the "never" word
is bad.  It's the default location.  And your advice may to scare the
completely clueless into wrecking their system.

It's a bad idea to put it in /home, because /home could be on an
unmounted partition, and root may need access to its home space to fix a
problem.  So if you're going to suggest shift it, don't suggest putting
it /home.  Certainly not without complete explanation.

Moving roots home further into the tree may help against some rm
accidents, but it's by no means a foolproof solution.  Bad wildcarding
choices will get them into the parent directory.  And prefixing the path
with the slash will destroy "/" contents no matter where they started
out working from.

-- 
[tim at localhost ~]$ uname -r
2.6.27.25-78.2.56.fc9.i686

Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored.  I
read messages from the public lists.