What is the difference between the sudo and su command?
What is the difference between the sudo and su command? Why does OS X handle these different than Linux?
Answer:
OS X handles sudo and su identically to Linux.
sudo is a command that, without any additional options, will run a command as root. For example:
% touch /newfile
touch: /newfile: Permission denied
% ls -l /newfile
ls: /newfile: No such file or directory
% sudo touch /newfile
% ls -l /newfile
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 0 Apr 27 11:45 /newfile
su on the other hand, will switch the current user to root (again without any extra commands). In the example below, I have to run sudo su, since I don't know the root password for my system:
% whoami
alake
% sudo su
$ whoami
root
The key difference between sudo and su is sudo runs a command as root, whereas su makes you root. Much like other command line utilities there are a number of alternative ways to use both sudo and su, if you're interested you can always run man <command> eg. man sudo to get more information.
Source: http://apple.stackexchange.com/
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