[solved] Help! I somehow screwed up $PATH for root [solved]

Odysseus · Last edited by Odysseus on Tue Apr 29, 2014 9:30 pm; edited 4 times in total

I don't know if this is the correct forum, so mods please feel free to move if required.

I need some help pretty badly. I have been trying to build Cyanogenmod and Evervolv (Android aftermarket ROMs) for my handset. I was having difficulty getting sudo to recognize the extra entries I had made to my $PATH statement to get the android-sdk working and git to initialize git in the new partition I created for Android development.

My user needed escalated privileges since I had created the required directories in /opt due to lack of space in my user's home directory. I had also placed some needed binaries in /usr/local/bin, example repo command. The problem was sudo (my preferred method of doing most work requiring escalated privileges) was only recognizing a small stripped subset of my user's $PATH. I tried a few things I read on other forums and succeeded in getting sudo to recognize the additional entries to $PATH, but I somehow screwed up something and now su no longer recognizing the entire $PATH and is behaving like sudo had been doing previously.

I've been trying for the last several hours to backtrack and see what I did to mess things up, but I can't for the life of me figure it out.

Here is what I'm talking about:

Jaglover · Posted: Sat Apr 19, 2014 11:59 pm Post subject:

Odysseus · Posted: Sun Apr 20, 2014 12:26 am Post subject:

Odysseus · Posted: Fri Apr 25, 2014 6:30 pm Post subject:

bumb

It's been a week, I'm still having this issue. Anyone have any ideas for a solution? TIA

John R. Graham · Posted: Fri Apr 25, 2014 6:36 pm Post subject:

Security on su has been tightened up for a while; providing a minimal path is now the default, whereas the --login (short form -l or a lone - as the last argument) option is now required to get a full path. Alas, you're going to have to live with the extra dash.

- John
_________________
I can confirm that I have received between 0 and 499 National Security Letters.

khayyam · Posted: Fri Apr 25, 2014 8:39 pm Post subject:

John, Odysseus, et al ...

hasn't it *always* been this way, I've always considered '--login', '-l', or '-', to be necessary for a login shell, I don't think I can every remember a time when this wasn't the case (though I almost always use '-' as I almost certainly want that the environment is correct for the UID). Take this post from the zsh-users mailing list circa 1997, a similar request, and the same behavior with 'su' sans '-l' ... and looking at the Changelog for sys-apps/shadow besides the sanitize_env() from 2010 I see nothing suggesting a recent change (though, that patch was removed in January, so prehaps upstream gave it some love recently).

John R. Graham · Posted: Fri Apr 25, 2014 8:59 pm Post subject:

In short, no. Some small number of years ago on Gentoo (perhaps 2-3), a lone "su" would give you a full path. I'm fairly monotheistic where Linux distributions are concerned, so I have no idea how other distributions behaved. But, since Gentoo follows upstream very closely, I would suspect this was an upstream change.

- John
_________________
I can confirm that I have received between 0 and 499 National Security Letters.

cwr · Veteran Joined: 17 Dec 2005 Posts: 1969

AFAIK "su" maintains the user's path, whereas "su -" moves to root's path,
essentially a root login. It's been like that for at least five years. The default
paths are set in /etc/profile, and my (edited) version is:

John R. Graham · Posted: Sat Apr 26, 2014 2:40 pm Post subject:

Except that su presented by itself doesn't source /etc/profile. It doesn't set up a "user's path" but an intentionally minimal path.

- John
_________________
I can confirm that I have received between 0 and 499 National Security Letters.

cwr · Veteran Joined: 17 Dec 2005 Posts: 1969

Odysseus · Posted: Tue Apr 29, 2014 9:29 pm Post subject:

Thanks for all of your input. Unfortunately, it seems that although the behavior I've been experiencing isn't normal no one had any ideas as to a solution. So I got desperate and did a total rebuild of my system over the course of the last few days. When complete, I evoked su from koqueror and did 'env-update && source /etc/profile' then rebooted. When I got back into my KDE environment, low and behold... my su problem had been resolved and is now functioning as expected.

I still have no idea how it got messed up, nor do I have any idea how exactly it resolved itself, but in any event it's now resolved. So I'm marking this thread as solved. Thanks again to all of you who responded.