BUG in 'su'

[Greywolf]

Hey, sh-utils folks,

There's a MAJOR bug in su.

I should be able to say

        su - user -X

and have the -X flag be passed to $user's shell at startup so that I can
debug startup scripts without having to put a 'set echo' or 'set verbose'
in the scripts (since they're scattered all over the place and I don't
know which one gets sourced first).  This is debugging a startup problem
in csh, by the way, but that I can handle.

The main problem is that su is broken -- it refuses to pass any shell
options to a user.  Go to a (for example) NetBSD machine and you will
discover that the above usage actually works.  su should not be
interpreting any other flags than '-' or '-l' or '-m/-p'; all others
should be passed on to the shell (originally the '-f' was there to
avoid syntax confusion in an emergency ("do I do su -f user or su
user -f?")).

Solaris behaves in the same way except that they tend to interpret '-f'
in the SysV way that it means 'full login', i.e. it's an alias for '-'.
I disagree with that interpretation, FWIW.

                                --*greywolf;
                /* Second Wave UNIX Historian since 1984 */