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This article is from the the Brief Linux FAQ (BLFAQ) Maintained by Neil Zanella nzanella@ganymede.cs.mun.ca

028. Why should I create ordinary user accounts. I'm the only user on this machine. Why not just work as root?

Root, commonly called the super-user, is for system administration tasks only. The normal protection mechanisms are eliminated for this account (indeed for any user with UID or GID equal to 0). So if you make any little mistake (for example the classic "rm * myfile" -- note the space between the wild-card and myfile) the system will do _exactly_ what you told it to do, not what you meant it to do. In the classic mistake above, the system will remove all files in the current directory, then complain because it can't remove 'myfile' which doesn't exist.

 

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• prev: 027. I've tried to create a shell script and made it setuid root so the users can execute it. But no matter what I do, it doesn't execute with root privilege. Why?
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• next: 029. I am able to establish a dial up connection but when I use telnet to connect to remote hosts telnet understands IP address but not host names. What can I do to have telnet and other programs understand host names?

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