What does it all mean?

[Mike Klinke]

On Tuesday 10 February 2004 08:37, live4bacon at optonline.net wrote:
> So reading through some messages today I thought I would take a
> look at: 'ps -ef | grep mysql'   Which I assume tells me who
> owns/started the Mysql processes?  And I know it is not a good for
> Mysql to run as root so I was curious as to whether this is the
> expected output and if not what do I need to do to fix it?
>
>
> root      4023     1  0 Feb08 ?        00:00:00 /bin/sh
> /usr/bin/safe_mysqld --defaults-file=/etc/my.cnf mysql     4047 
> 4023  0 Feb08 ?        00:00:01 /usr/libexec/mysqld
> --defaults-file=/etc/my.cnf --basedir=/usr --datadir=/var/lib/mysql
> --user=mysql --pid-file=/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.pid --skip-locking
>
> Thanks,
> JP

"man mysqld" explains each of the arguments you list above.  Most 
notably, in reference to your question would be the paragraph 
indicated by the entry:

-u|--user=user_name

Run  mysqld  daemon  as user user_name. This option is mandatory when 
starting mysqld as root.

Regards,  Mike Klinke