[TriLUG] to delete root, or not too?

[William Sutton]

/me mutters about how much of what we regard as the "standard" UNIX 
environment having evolved with little or no long range planning

-- 
William Sutton


On Tue, 14 Nov 2006, Alan Porter wrote:

> 
> > Another interesting note, is that on most *BSD systems, the root 
> > user's shell is csh.  This causes some pain for those people who 
> > aren't familiar with it, but since all the boot scripts are written in 
> > csh, and run with the root user's shell, you can't reasonably change 
> > it and then reboot the system.
> 
> Any shell programmer worth his salt would explicitly specify the shell 
> interpreter in the first line of all shell scripts (the first line 
> should contain #!/bin/myshell).  Otherwise, it depends on reading the 
> running user's preferred shell (in most cases, from the current value of 
> the $SHELL variable).
> 
> If these shell scripts were written properly, then it would not matter 
> which login shell was in /etc/passwd under the entry for 'root'.  And it 
> would not matter which shell the user happened to be running when he 
> issued commands.
> 
> Anything else is just plain sloppiness.
> 
> Alan
> 
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