On Tuesday 19 August 2003 20:33, Hossein S. Zadeh wrote: > On Tue, 19 Aug 2003, Aryan Ameri wrote: > > root can't be a user name. normal users on Unix systems do not have > > the ability to use 'root' as their username. > > Of course you can! Just edit /etc/passwd file. >
No you can't. The reason is simple. On any Unix system, the first username that is assigned to the system is 'root'. On any Unix installation, you first setup root, and then add other users to the system. Now the problem is that after there is a user called root, you can not add another user called 'root' to the system. there can't be two users with the same user name on the system. So, in order to have a normal user called root, you have to remove 'root'. And you simply can't do that, because in order to add/remove users to the system, you have to be root, and a user can not delete himself (root can not delete root). In a nuttshell, no, in no Unix system, can you have a normal user called root. It's one of the principles of Unix. The issue was solved, way back, in 1970. When Thompson and Ritchie were designing Unix, one of the foundaions of their OS, was that there should be a user, which can not be removed, and should have a unique username. That user was called 'root'. Refer to 'The Unix Philosophy' http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1555581234/104-0954486-7271150?v=glance Cheers -- /* "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."*/ --President Eisenhower Aryan Ameri _______________________________________________ bna-linuxiran mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bna-linuxiran
