[Techtalk] Powers of root

Anne Wainwright anotheranne at fables.co.za
Sun Aug 31 13:17:10 UTC 2008


Hi, there,

I thought root had unlimited powers of creation and destruction and now I wonder about this.

When installing sane and stuff (see concurrent posting on this if interested) I was running, as root, two scripts to install and update sane and hp3970 stuff.

in both cases the scripts baled out 'unable to create directory ....'

in both cases i used mc and made the directories and then rerun the script. it found the already-existing directories and went ahead with no futher complaint. For instance one directory  is /etc/udev which is 755 same as /etc

Note, I open a terminal and then use su and log in as root, this is just the same as logging in as root when you start up linux, right?

Question, why would this happen? I have noticed this behaviour before.

thanks, enjoy your Sunday.

Anne

-- 
so much to do, so little time :(


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