On Wed, 2004-05-19 at 18:50, Col wrote: > Christopher Sawtell wrote: > > >On Wednesday 19 May 2004 17:35, Don Gould wrote: > > > > > >>Why shouldn't I compile as root? > >> > >> > >Because one day, either directly, or indirectly using a Trojan of some kind, > >somebody is going to attempt to do something nasty to your machine. Indeed > >that person may, accidentally, be you. If you run their hidden program as > >root they will get root and have control of your machine. If they are nice > >they will only persuade you to run 'rm -rf /' ( Why don't you try it? :-) and > >all you will have to do is to reload the file-set, complete with the > >invisible trojan, from backup. On the other hand they may well have a much > >more insidious criminal intent, and you will end up attempting to explain to > >a very suspicious Mr. Plod that you did not do what you appear to have done. > >As a minimum, you'll end up having to find several thousand Reserve Bank > >purchasing tokens to pay for the excess ip traffic. > > > >On the other hand if you have only user privileges they can only damage that > >which is in your home directory. The Linux system itself is unharmed. > > > >For more comprehensive explanations see what Google has to say on the matter:- > > > >http://www.google.co.nz/linux?q=%22compile+as+root%22&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&start=0&sa=N > > > >IOW: Just don't do it. EVER, or read mail, or do the IRC thing, as root. > > > > > > > Is there a way to avoid this then? > > $ emerge -u world > emerge: root access required. > > > Cheers > Col.
This is something nifty someone showed me a while ago that most people here probably already know about, so I'll get here first :D. I usually just run as a normal user and then use $ su -c "<some command>" when I need to do something as root. It will run just the command inside the "". Unfortunately it doesn't support auto-completion inside the quotation marks. -- Slosh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> "Space, it seems to go on and on forever, but then you get to the end and a gorilla starts throwing barrels at you."
