On Wed, 2003-07-02 at 08:51, Greg Hosler wrote: > I'm teaching RH033 this week, and thought I could handle anything that would > get thrown at me. > > Then one student noticed that root is a member of the following groups: > > root bin daemon sys adm disk wheel > > and they asked the (what seems to me to be) obvious question: Why is root in > all these groups. after all, isn't root root ? Why does root need to be in > these groups ? > > And I couldn't come up w/ an answer... > > Admittedly I was tired (at the end of a rather long day). > > is this "historic" in nature, and people are afraid to just remove the > unnecessary groups from root ? Or is there a real reason why root needs to be > in someone elses group ? (I can't even think of a historic reason why this > might need to be...) >
It'll be interesting to see if someone really knows but I always assumed that part of what made root root was the inclusion in all these groups. I know that uid 0 has additional power in many programs but I thought that the ability to write to certain devices without prompting came from the group memberships. Bret -- redhat-list mailing list unsubscribe mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list
