The conventions tag has no wiki summary.
57
votes
2answers
5k views
Why do we use su - and not just su?
I don't understand why su - is preferred over su to login as root.
25
votes
16answers
4k views
Why do unix-heads say “minus”?
A couple of weeks ago I attended a talk on Git by someone who seemed to be from a Windows background. I say "seemed to be" because he kept saying "dash" when referring to command-line options. I ...
23
votes
2answers
1k views
Why are shared libraries executable?
Why have almost all the shared libraries in /usr/lib/ have the executable permission bit set? I don't see any use case for executing them. Some do manage to hook-up some form of main function to print ...
