[rescue] mesg: cannot change mode

[Kevin Loch]

"Loomis, Rip" wrote:
>  "su - username" probably a good idea if you're trying to
>         troubleshoot a problem with that account.
>  "su [root]" or "su username" okay, but not preferred
>       (keeps the current directory unchanged, but leaves
>         you with a shell config from a different account--
>         so there's a tradeoff for things like having "."
>         in your path...)
> 

su - username is quite common where special environments
are created for certain processes (oracle, sybase, db2, netscape etc.).

A good bit of advice is to omit relative paths in the root
user configs.  FreeBSD used to nag about that in earlier
versions but they dropped that (why?).

KL