sudo

[Derek Broughton]

On Thursday 21 April 2005 00:56, dj faké wrote:
> if "root" user is an inherent part of (l)unix; what's the benefit for
> not having it? Is this some sort of Mac parallel?

The benefit is partly in simplicity (for the developers).  Instead of typing 
"sudo" you could have any system command automatically invoke sudo every time 
anybody invoked it (and you can make sudo allow access to only specific 
commands, too), but this method is more backwards compatible.

You have to have privileged commmands, if you're going to have a secure 
system.  How you grant that privilege has traditionally been by allowing only 
one user to execute them.  Sudo allows finer grained control (though kubuntu 
doesn't make it any finer grained than the old way).  Of course, once you 
rely on kdesu and sudo, you really need a ksudoers app to maintain 
the /etc/sudoers file
-- 
derek