SULOGIN(8)

✨ SULOGIN(8) ✨

okay bestie, buckle up — this is sulogin, aka single-user login, and she's the bouncer at the door of your system's most exclusive little party 💅

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🌸 NAME 🌸

<sulogin>sulogin</sulogin> — single-user login 🫶

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🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

sulogin [options] [tty]

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

so basically sulogin gets summoned by init the moment your system drops into single-user mode. it's giving "we need to talk" energy but for your machine ✨

then it hits the user with this prompt, verbatim:

Give root password for system maintenance (or type Control-D for normal
startup):

and if the root account is locked and --force was specified? no password needed at all, walk right in 💀

sulogin will be connected to the current terminal, or to that optional tty device you can drop on the command line — typically /dev/console 👑

when the user exits the single-user shell, or just presses control-D at the prompt, the system keeps on booting. main character exit, honestly 🌈

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💖 OPTIONS 💖

• -e, --force — if the normal way of grabbing the root password from the system via getpwnam(3) fails, then it goes digging through /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow instead. and if those files are damaged or straight-up nonexistent, or if the root account is locked by '!' or '*' at the begin of the password, then sulogin just starts a root shell without asking for a password. no cap 😭

⚠️ only use the -e option if you are sure the console is physically protected against unauthorized access. like, fr fr. this is not a drill 💀

• -p, --login-shell — specifying this option causes sulogin to start the shell process as a login shell 🐚
• -t, --timeout seconds — specify the maximum amount of time to wait for user input. by default, sulogin will wait forever. and i mean forever forever, bestie — she's patient, she's loyal, she will simply stand there 🕰️
• -h, --help — display help text and exit 👋
• -V, --version — display version and exit ⭐

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🌈 ENVIRONMENT 🌈

sulogin goes looking for the environment variable SUSHELL or sushell to figure out what shell to start. if that variable isn't set, it tries to execute root's shell from /etc/passwd. and if that fails? it falls back to /bin/sh. resilient queen 🧚

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👑 AUTHORS 👑

SULOGIN was written by Miquel van Smoorenburg for sysvinit, and later ported to util-linux by Dave Reisner and Karel Zak. legends, honestly 💜

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😭 REPORTING BUGS 😭

for bug reports, use the issue tracker <https://github.com/util-linux/util-linux/issues>. don't be shy, they wanna hear it 🫶

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🍓 AVAILABILITY 🍓

the sulogin command is part of the util-linux package, which can be downloaded from Linux Kernel Archive <https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/>. go get her ✨

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and that's the whole vibe, bestie — this page ships with util-linux 2.42.4, dated 2026-09-21, and it's the SULOGIN(8) manual, slay 💅🎀