Mac OS X in a Nutshell

Name

su

Synopsis

su [option] [user] [shell_args]

Creates a shell with the effective user-ID user. If no user is specified, creates a shell for a privileged user (that is, becomes a superuser). Enter EOF to terminate. You can run the shell with particular options by passing them as shell_args (e.g., if the shell runs sh, you can specify -c command to execute command via sh or -r to create a restricted shell).

Options

-l

Go through the entire login sequence (i.e., change to user’s environment).

-c command

Execute command in the new shell and then exit immediately. If command is more than one word, it should be enclosed in quotes—for example:

                              su -c 'find / -name \*.c -print' nobody

-f

Start shell with -f option. In csh and tcsh, this suppresses the reading of the .cshrc file. In bash, this suppresses filename pattern expansion.

-m

Do not reset environment variables.