"su" does not work on FreeBSD

Question

Below I sun "su" command on FreeBSD:

FreeBSD rand.vstyle.local 9.0-RELEASE FreeBSD 9.0-RELEASE #0 amd64

This is server RAND :)

[svn@rand ~]$ su logostudiotest1 /bin/ls
Password:
/bin/ls: /bin/ls: cannot execute binary file

Why "su" does not work?!

Silly question, maybe, but can you run /bin/ls as any other user? — Jeff Albert, Feb 04 '13 at 18:14

MDMarra · Answer 1 · 2013-02-04T19:35:44.033

14

According to the su manpage if you want to run a command as another user using su, you should use the -c switch.

For example: su logostudiotest1 -c /bin/ls

edited Feb 04 '13 at 19:35

answered Feb 04 '13 at 19:19

MDMarra

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Yeah, this. The command given in the question won't work on Linux either. – mattdm Feb 04 '13 at 19:32
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`ls` makes a lousy shell. – David Schwartz Feb 05 '13 at 01:04

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 05 '13 at 01:05

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I think you've confused su with sudo. This should work fine:

# sudo -u logostudiotest1 /bin/ls

answered Feb 05 '13 at 01:05

Stephan

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score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Nov 27 '22 at 14:58

I've had the problem while using chroot'ed 32-bit libraries on a 64-bit version of FreeBSD.

At first I thought something with ldconfig -32 might help, but than I noticed it was using PAM and/or several other authentication scheme that older programs didn't know.

I ended up just writing short C programs to chain the user shells or whatever else I needed to run, and then chmod'ed them to 4550 and used the group number (guid) to prevent unauthorized access to those programs. I could have also just programmed in a hard-coded password or whatever.

"su" does not work on FreeBSD

3 Answers3