Root 101 - Concept of Root for Newbies

Fozz writes "One of my colleagues wrote this article explaining the concept of root/super user for Unix newbies. He wrote it after looking for information like it and not finding much. His analogy of Unix and an apartment complex is one of the best metaphors I've seen for understanding multi-user OSes." If you're running any variety of Unix, you've probably been forced to learn this pretty well already, but this is a very lucid explanation to point out to curious friends / co-workers who aren't so sure.

Comments

Re:Kludge?

[btlzu2]

I've always hated how "superuser" caught on, presumably because of the su command. The su command stands for "switch user", not superuser. Does anyone know about that? It's a freakin' pet peeve of mine, however, even man pages refer to a superuser. There is no "superuser", there's root.

Sorry to diverge in the discussion. Carry on, nothing to see here...