This hint assumes you are using the default bash shell. If you need to run a series of commands interactively as root (or any other user) using sudo, it's most convenient to start a new shell session with the effective user ID you want by typing sudo -s. Prior to Leopard, you would then get a shell prompt similar to the usual one, but with the effective username in place of your username. For example, if you were logged into host foo.local as user bar, your regular shell prompt would be [foo:~] bar$ ...where the ~ represents your home directory (and it will change to show the current directory). If you started a root shell with sudo -s, the prompt would become... [foo:~] root# ...so you could see at a glance where you were and who you were. Und...

	Read more at MacOsxHints
	feeds.macosxhints.com/~r/macosxhints/recent/~3/254323097/article.php