>> otoh, if you do this instead
>> 
>> 	su root -l
>> 
>> it *will* be a login shell, so it will read /etc/profile.  you can
>> also use -p (or combine them) there if you wish.
>
>Actually I believe you should do:
>	su - root

well...the difference there is how the shell gets told to be a login
shell.  in my example, i'm explicitly telling the shell to be a login
shell.  in your case, su implicitly tells the shell that it's a login
shell...

...for whatever that's worth.

i also just type 'su' all my itself.  works fer me.  :)

>Also remember that $SHELL is just an environment variable,
>- typically used to define which shell to run (ie by !command).
>It doesn't have to match the actual shell, indeed after 'su root'
>it will still be that of the environment of whatever ran su.

hence the setting of the SU_FROM variable by the su program.  so that
you can tell.

>Often [ "$RANDOM" = "RANDOM" ] is used to separate ksh from
>the bourne sh.

do you mean '[ "$RANDOM" = "$RANDOM" ]'?

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