As we all know, it's possible to execute Terminal commands with administrator priviledges by prefacing the command with sudo, and then entering the corresponding password. On unix and linux machines, one usually accomplishes this by becoming a "superuser" after typing su and then entering the root password (actually su stands for substitute user, which defaults to root). Then you're in a new shell where all typed commands are run as root, and you must log out to be brought back to your standard shell with regular priviledges. This can be quite useful when you have a lot of work that needs to be done as root.
In OS X, one can mimic this by typing sudo -s, hitting return, and entering the password. The -s flag drops you into a new shell, just as su does in linux and unix. I put this in my .cshrc startup file:
alias su sudo -sand now I can become "superuser" the same way I always have.
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20040115150558632