From: Tobias Leupold <tl@stonemx.de>
To: ~alpine/users@lists.alpinelinux.org
Subject: ash and su/su -
Date: Sat, 25 May 2024 11:49:31 +0200
Message-ID: <1926392.IobQ9Gjlxr@ginuog>
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Hi all :-)

I'm new to Alpine Linux. I replaced Devuan with Alpine for my Raspberry Pi 
yesterday, and now I stumbled upon one thing that may be due to the Busybox 
ash shell:

I wanted to keep the nice minimalism Alpine brings and keep using ash (on all 
my other machines, I have, like most of us, bash). I learned I could add 
~/.profile to add a nice PS1, aliases and such stuff there. I did that for 
both my normal user and root.

However, I noticed that when I run su to become root, this file is not sourced 
and I get the default prompt I had before, without my aliases. When I do su -, 
I see the shell as if I e.g. connected directly to root via ssh, but e.g. the 
current directory is changed to /root.

This is different from what I know from my other machines. On my Gentoo, 
Artix, Devuan and Ubuntu machines, I (apparently) see no difference to the 
shell, no matter if I login directly to root, or do an su.

So what's the background? What is the difference of "su" and "su -"? And can I 
make ~/.profile being sourced when I do a simple "su"?

Thanks for all clarification and help!

Cheers, Tobias