Date: Wed, 12 Mar 2008 16:07:20 +0000 From: Alex Zbyslaw <xfb52@dial.pipex.com> To: Bill Moran <wmoran@potentialtech.com> Cc: freebsd-questions <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: Superuser password lost Message-ID: <47D7FFB8.40506@dial.pipex.com> In-Reply-To: <20080312112736.47c2c4b5.wmoran@potentialtech.com> References: <47D7CE4E.7030508@alshome.be> <20080312095238.35d257d2.wmoran@potentialtech.com> <20080312151922.GC6354@gizmo.acns.msu.edu> <20080312112736.47c2c4b5.wmoran@potentialtech.com>
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Bill Moran wrote: >I don't know of anywhere in the FreeBSD base system >that the term "superuser" is used, so I assume he'll get a more >direct answer from the PC-BSD folks. > > Hate to be picky, because I'd agree with most everything else you wrote, but superuser, and its synonym super-user, do appear in many base man pages, for example the su page shown below. Sometimes it's a shortcut for root (or other UID 0 user), like below in su, sometimes just for effective UID 0 in general, for example as in mount(8). > The su utility requests appropriate user credentials via PAM and > switches > to that user ID (the default user is the superuser). A shell is then > executed. I'd contend that the su manpage *should* say root not superuser, since root is hardwired as the default. But for other cases, any user with UID 0 might work just as well (e.g. toor). --Alex
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