Curbing Your Power: Superuserroot Access

Curbing Your Power: Superuser/root Access

While you are logged in as the user named root, you are referred to as Superuser or administrator and have extraordinary privileges. You can read from or write to any file on the system, execute programs that ordinary users cannot, and more. On a multiuser system you may not be permitted to know the root password, but someoneusually the system administratorknows the root password and maintains the system. When you are running Linux on your own computer, you will assign a password to root when you install Linux. Refer to "System Administrator and Superuser" on page 391 for more information.

Caution: Do not experiment as Superuser

Feel free to experiment when you are logged in as a nonprivileged user, such as when you log in as yourself. When you log in as root (Superuser) or whenever you give the Superuser/root password, however, do only what you have to do and make sure you know exactly what you are doing. After you have completed the task at hand, revert to working as yourself. When working as Superuser/root, you can damage the Linux system to such an extent that you will need to reinstall Red Hat Linux to get it working again.

"System Administration" on page 99 describes tasks you may want to perform working as root.