On Thu, Dec 23, 2004 at 12:48:27PM -0500, morpheus wrote: > Yes, "su -" with no "r" It was late... > The big reason you are advised not to run anything as root is that you > have the ability to really screw things up. If you really want to use a > GUI file manager and you are careful, and you make sure to close it down > when you're finished, I don't see a problem. Another big reason is that it keeps misbehaving applications from screwing things up too. Maybe there's a security bug in one of the multiple libraries linked into your GUI file manager, and when you click on some untested downloaded file as root, surprise, it's got a exploit. This is much less likely to happen with cp, mv, or rm. (ldd /usr/bin/nautilus|wc -l; ldd /bin/mv|wc -l) -- Matthew Miller mattdm@xxxxxxxxxx <http://www.mattdm.org/> Boston University Linux ------> <http://linux.bu.edu/>
