The Role of root

In recent articles I covered starting up and shutting down a system. Now I will begin to write about administration issues when the system is running. The first step is to understand the root user and user permissions. UNIX-like operating systems of which Linux is an example are multi-user. What this means is that more than one person, identified by a user ID and a password, can use the computer system. What is implied here is that these multiple persons can use the system at the same time. While that is an interesting concept, the important piece of this puzzle I want to write about here has to do with ownership of files and file access permissions.

Every file stored on the system has one owner. It also belongs to one group but I am going to skip over that information now. Each file also has a set of permissions associated with it. These permissions restrict who has read access and write access to the file, who can run the file as a program and a few other associated permissions.

Read Full Story