On Fri, 9 Jul 2004, Roger Marquis wrote:
> Where do people come up with these folk "rules"? I spend all day
> working in various root shells as part of my job. Couldn't do it
> otherwise.
It depends on what type of work you're doing, I suppose. The idea is you
should only use root for things that are absolutely necessary. In theory,
you should read man pages, investigate everything, and pull up a second
shell as root just it issue commands with it. The reasoning is if there's
a bug in a program (like man, or lynx, netscape) you could hose the whole
system up if you're root (or get it infected). On the less paranoid side,
a mistype as root could have rather bad consequences.
--
Matt Piechota
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