Re: man du versus BLOCKSIZE

[Austin Hook <austin@canuck.com>]

On Sat, 9 May 1998, Vadim Vygonets wrote:
> Oh well, one may want to use his own environment (nice tcsh or (No!
> No!  Don't say it!) bash with command line editing, beautiful
> aliases etc.) even when he's root.  But then, when that one person
> has to stay in single-user mode for a while with sh (or csh) and
> ed, that becomes a nice self-LART.  I, personally, when being root,
> always like to be reminded of that by the simple "machine# " prompt
> (oh, tha hash, the mighty hash character...) and other minimalisms.

That makes sense to me.  I wonder what the argument against it could be.
It seems to me that the context for controlling the system is quite
different from the context of being a regular user.   And being a regular
user much of the time is good practice and perspective for the sysop too.

I implemented your suggestion of deleting "alias su -m" and found "su"
immediately more friendly, without having to rewrite my .cshrc and other
startup scripts.  

Still,  I immediately found one disadvantage of not being logged in as
root:  when I start the pppd daemon now I don't get the usual messages to
root that tell me the dynamic internet address, and the confirmation that
pppd is working.  Usually I like ppp to tell me if it times out or has
some other problem connecting to my ISP.  So I still find a disadvantage
in not logging in as root.

Other than that, I have long since changed my root shell to use tcsh. 
Also, being in a shell doesn't put me in single user mode, as I use
different virtual terminals, F9 for my user mode login, and F12 for my
root login.  (on a 486). 

What is a "LART"?

Austin Hook