Re: Root user with reason, and thanks

[Shera <sschneider coqui net>]

Thanks to Steve Borho who gave me the perfect solution to my delima.  Below
I left my question complete and his answer so other can learn as I did.
And to the people that put me down are threw my question to the dogs...
sheez people come on alot of us in the list are still learning, give us a
brake.  I have been in computers since 84, and no matter how much I learn I
continue learning more. 

Happy New Years to all!



> Well you make perfect sense.  The thing is that I found a program that I
> can run remote and it checks all the log files in my redhat computer and
> then puts a webpage so I can see the basic statistics of my site.  Problem
> being that I have to ftp in with the program, it goes to my log files reads
> them but if I am not root I cant read the log files, but as root I can not
> ftp.  So I (being still quite new to linux) thought that maybe as another
> user with root privledges I could do this.  I presume this is a security
> risk, but like many things I do with my private system, I install , see how
> they work, then kill them.

If that's all you need, you would be better off doing something like this:

groupadd logfiles
chgrp logfiles /var/log/messages
chmod g+r /var/log/messages

Then add your user to group 'logfiles'.