(SOLVED) -OpenOffice LibreOffice

[uncleV]

[uncleV@localhost ~]$ su melodie
su: user melodie does not exist
[uncleV@localhost ~]$ su
Password:
[root@localhost uncleV]#

[longtom]

Hmm ... su ... I always thought it stands for "switch user" .  I have read it somewhere some time ago.  It made perfect sense to me since you can use su to switch to another user .... like su john ... enter password.

Just sayin' 

[uncleV]

Just saying too:
I think it's substitute but not switch. Mind the difference between su and su - .
?

[Bald Brick]

Hmm ... su ... I always thought it stands for "switch user" .  I have read it somewhere some time ago.  It made perfect sense to me since you can use su to switch to another user .... like su john ... enter password.

Just sayin'  

su has been interpreted as meaning switch user, superuser, subshell and substitute user.

Since before Linux existed substitute user was the "official" meaning that you would find in books about Unix and in the the man pages for su. To interpret su as super user just seemed silly if you knew that you could also su to other users than root.

But then muungwana found this link: http://pthree.org/2009/12/31/the-meaning-of-su/. It shows that the original meaning of su may indeed have been "superuser" -- long before you could su to anyone but root. Or so it seems.

But to quote uncleV: "Mind the difference between su and su -". That's actually more important.