Chown ???

Paul Newell pnewell at cs.cmu.edu
Thu Apr 9 03:53:02 UTC 2009


Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> On Wed, 2009-04-08 at 17:24 +0100, Alan Cox wrote:
>   
>>> As I said already, 'su' *was* 'superuser', but it changed. My first Unix
>>> system was 5th Edition, circa 1975, and I definitely remember it this
>>> way. In fact that version of 'su' didn't even take an argument.
>>>       
>> That makes sense - so it changed description in v7 when the command
>> itself changed entirely.
>>     
>
> Exactly.
>
> poc
>
>   
Rather full mailbox tonight. That being said, good to hear earlier 
sources which can make a point both ways. Technical implementation and 
linguistic usage don't always have to follow one another.

Of course, I can't resist noting that this forum has pointed me to 
information that GNOME display manager logins as root are disallowed in 
f10 unless one overrides 
(https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Enabling_Root_User_For_GNOME_Display_Manager). 
So, though Linux per Fedora may say it is now "switch user", the access 
to be "super-user" is now through "su" or "sudo" and I wouldn't be 
surprised if "su to root" will be thought of as Fedora's way to become 
"super-user".

Have to find my copy of DP Devil's Dictionary to see what it says ...

Paul







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