Thoughts about running as root

[Jason Clinton]

Jonathan Hutchins wrote:

>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.
>
>
A recent (May) Ask Slashdot on the subject:
http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/05/06/0348213&mode=thread&tid=179

A funny quote from a poster in that article:
"Root is like crack"
"Don't smoke it. I did once and got hooked. I ran Mac OS Updates as
root. Fuck, I even had sex with my girlfriend as root. Man, that caused
some permissions problems. When I started the road to recovery (logging
in as Zacks) my girlfriend was all like: "Fuck no! You can't get any
cause you don't own me an I don't go groups. You don't have the power to
read, write OR execute so get out of my FACE" So I was all HELL NO
bitch. And she wuz like you do not have root (superuser) privlages so
get out of my TruBlueEnvironment! So then I went chown and chmodded her
ass to me. Dat be-otch be up in my hizzouse. What what. Holla!"