Some ubuntu questions (mainly re:mplayer)
- Thread starter thegoonden
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- 21 May 2007
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Righty, need to run update again to remove the source.
BTW....
All the Ubuntu docs seem to be sudo this and sudo that. Is there a sensible reason for that or is it just because they're trying to prevent win-numpties doing rm -rf /
(mind you "sudo rm -rf /" works just as well, and that doesn't need the root password)
BTW....
All the Ubuntu docs seem to be sudo this and sudo that. Is there a sensible reason for that or is it just because they're trying to prevent win-numpties doing rm -rf /
(mind you "sudo rm -rf /" works just as well, and that doesn't need the root password)
Bit of both really, to prevent people from doing stupid stuff as root without thinking about it (i.e. you need to think to specifically add sudo to your command). There is also a wheel group which only members of that group can escalate their privileges up to super user. So it locks stuff down even further. You can use sudo to restrict the subset of commands in which a normal user can do when invoking sudo.. It also provides a means to maintain a better audit trail.
Its to do with principle of least privileges as well: you execute a program as root user. It gets owned and your box gets totally owned. If that program was only running as a normal user it wouldn't be able to do as much. In the olden days a lot of people used to run their single user boxes as root user - really stupid. Thus you shouldn't use root unless it is totally necessary.
Its to do with principle of least privileges as well: you execute a program as root user. It gets owned and your box gets totally owned. If that program was only running as a normal user it wouldn't be able to do as much. In the olden days a lot of people used to run their single user boxes as root user - really stupid. Thus you shouldn't use root unless it is totally necessary.
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