On Tue, Aug 30, 2022 at 08:38:02 +0700, Robert Elz wrote: > Date: Tue, 30 Aug 2022 02:27:33 +0300 > From: Valery Ushakov <u...@stderr.spb.ru> > Message-ID: <yw1lzafmjkavh...@pony.stderr.spb.ru> > > | Is there any particular reason why /root/.profile and /root/.cshrc > | (that have hard links in / too, for the single user mode i guess) are > | not writable? > > Aside from applications like vi rm mv etc (probably more) which require > a slight bit more effort if the file has no write permission, what > difference does the user 'w' (or 'r' ... 'x' does matter) permission > bit really make on a root owned file?
Exactly my point. So why do we inflict that on people (ourselves included)? .shrc is writable but .profile is not and (vice versa) for csh - .login is writable and .cshrc is not. Dot files are meant to be edited, so "aside from vi" is, IMO, a mischaracterization of a situation. And "a slight bit more" accumulates over different test VMs etc. -uwe
