On Tue, Dec 25, 2007 at 04:23:34PM +0100, Mike Lott wrote: > Hi list > > I've been wondering why system accounts from UID 28 upwards are > prepended with an underscore, whereas UID's in the range 0 up to 27 do > not have this. I've done a bunch of searches on Google, but come up > with nothing as yet. > > Could anyone enlighten me? > > Thanks, > > Mike >
The ones from 0 to 27 are/were set in stone by long history. The _* ones were introduced in OpenBSD as part of the elimination of suid programs. By assigning a different account to each individual system service the damage a broken service can do is minimized. By prefacing them with _ a lot of namespace collisions are avoided and it is obvious which ones are 'services' vs 'people'. .... Ken
