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Problem: to access an account in MacOS with the su-command, more here. I can access my other accounts, but not the one created according to the intructions. The command does not change the user:

su postgres

Question: Why can I not access an account with the su-command?

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migrated from stackoverflow.com Jul 22 '09 at 21:09

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1 Answer

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Do you get any sort of error? It could be that the account has an invalid shell (like /usr/bin/false) in which case it would switch to that user and immediately exit.

Try:

sudo -u postgres -H bash

Which will tell it to switch to the postgres user, set the HOME environment variable appropriately, and execute the bash shell

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Great thanks! There was no error message, so I was very confused of the problem. Thank you again. – UnixBasics Jul 22 '09 at 21:03
If there was no error message, are you sure it didn't work? – Liudvikas Bukys Jul 22 '09 at 21:17
check /etc/passwd to see if the shell assigned to postgres is a valid one. check /etc/shells too. – sybreon Jul 23 '09 at 11:11
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