[plug] Su vs Sudo

[Cameron Patrick]

Joshua Chase wrote:

> Which is better sudo or su? I think su is better because of ease of
> config. Sudo requires alot of configuration which is not done by
> default on many distros.

They do different things.

`su` allows any user to become another user if they have that user's
credentials (i.e. password).

`sudo` allows a user to execute particular commands as another user
using its own credentials (with the set of such commands being defined
by root by running visudo).

On a single-user desktop system, there's a certain amount of sense in
only having a single account with a single password and using sudo for
all administrative tasks.  Ubuntu and Mac OS X do things this way.  On a
multi-user system, the fine-grained permissions that sudo allows can be
handy.  None of this makes su any less useful.

Cameron