theoretical question - can root's username be changed?

[Jeff Vian]

On Fri, 2005-12-02 at 15:20 -0500, Matthew Saltzman wrote:
> On Fri, 2 Dec 2005, Mike McCarty wrote:
> >
> > One thing I can think of: There are e-mails sent to root
> > from various subsystems to notify of events.
> 
> But you don't need to have the userid to route mail successfully.  See 
> /etc/aliases:
> 
>  	...
>  	# Person who should get root's mail
>  	#root:          marc
> 
> Just uncomment the second line above and put the forwarding address in 
> place of "marc", save, run newaliases, and mail forwarding works, even if 
> there is no root user.
> 
> I'm not claiming everything works with no root, but mail forwarding does.

If I am understanding correctly though, there are many aliases with root
on the right side, and the entries on the right must be a valid username
or address.  

I think it may work after performing the change you show above, but that
would be a *mandatory* condition if the root user name did not exist.