[TUHS] Why root user name?

[TUHS] Why root user name?

[Warren Toomey]

As I was dropping off to sleep last night, I wondered why the superuser
account on Unix is called root.

There's a hierarchy of directories and files beginning at the tree root /.
There's a hierarchy of processes rooted with init. But there's no hierarchy
of users, so why the moniker "root"?

Any ideas?

Cheers, Warren

[TUHS] Why root user name?

[John Cowan]

Warren Toomey scripsit:

> There's a hierarchy of directories and files beginning at the tree root /.
> There's a hierarchy of processes rooted with init. But there's no hierarchy
> of users, so why the moniker "root"?

Either because / was root's home directory (until /root was invented),
or because only root could typically write /.  If anybody remembers otherwise,
they are not talking.

-- 
John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
Andrew Watt on Microsoft:  Never in the field of human computing has so
much been paid by so many to so few! (pace Winston Churchill)

[TUHS] Why root user name?

[arnold]

Warren Toomey <wkt at tuhs.org> wrote:

> As I was dropping off to sleep last night, I wondered why the superuser
> account on Unix is called root.
>
> There's a hierarchy of directories and files beginning at the tree root /.
> There's a hierarchy of processes rooted with init. But there's no hierarchy
> of users, so why the moniker "root"?
>
> Any ideas?

From BWK:

> Date: Thu, 17 Sep 2015 05:35:30 -0400 (EDT)
> From: Brian Kernighan <bwk at CS.Princeton.EDU>
> To: arnold at skeeve.com
> Subject: Re: why the name "root" for userid 0?
>
> I will speculate, without knowledge, that it's because the
> super user can access the files in the root directory.
>
> Ken would know, though perhaps not answer...
>
> Brian

Maybe some of the former BTLers could ask him? :-)

Thans,

Arnold