su or sudo su?

[Tom H]

On Tue, Oct 19, 2010 at 8:22 AM, Craig White <craigwhite at azapple.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 2010-10-18 at 10:05 -0600, Petrus de Calguarium wrote:
>> When I need root access, I used to use sudo su -. Recently, I discovered I
>> could simply type su -.
>>
>> What's the difference:
>>
>> su -
>> sudo su -
>>
> ----
> I can't imagine why any UNIX/Linux system would allow a 'sudo su'
> command.
>
> su -
>
> is just a whole lot less typing
>
> sudo su -
>
> can be a security nightmare
>
> however on Debian/Ubuntu systems where there is generally no 'superuser'
> login allowed, you would have to 'sudo su -' to obtain a continuous
> superuser shell.

Or use sudo's options:

"sudo -i" = "sudo su -"
and
"sudo -s" = "sudo su"

The difference between "sudo su -" and "su -" as I and others have
pointed out in this thread is that you only supply the password of the
user invoking sudo for the former (for the standard sudoers setup) and
root's password for the latter.