Thoughts about running as root

[Jonathan Hutchins]

Ever since I started messing with Linux, there's been this conflict.  All
the experienced gurus, authors, and pundits strictly advise against running
as root.  With a new install, especially of the older distributions, you
can't do squat except as root.  Even now, most of my time in Linux is not
spent in userland, but working on the system.

As with the "warning" on editing your crontab, though, I think this is a
spurious caution.  Most of the "errors" that they warn you about are errors
that would only be made by someone with a good deal of experience running
Linux as a user.  For instance, I've never issued "rm -r *" or it's deadly
variants in years of use.

It may be that having come from a system-level environment, either running
DOS on PC's or running JCL and system management on mainframes, I'm more
aware of what I'm doing.  Or it may just be that the habits I've built up in
Linux are based on the fact that I'm root, and I know I can affect the
system if I don't pay attention.

So while it's fairly dangerous for someone with a lot of Unix user
experience to run Linux as root, for me it's no worse than running DOS as
... well, running DOS.