Users and Groups

[Rick Stevens]

On Fri, 2007-12-07 at 23:30 +0000, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> Steve Searle wrote:
> 
> >> I don't like to feel that Linux is not telling me something
> >> because it doesn't think it is good for me.
> > 
> > What, like hidden files?
> 
> You mean, files whose names start with "."?
> I must say, that is not one of my favourite aspects of Unix.
> I was trying to think if it was always like that?
> (I go back to Unix edition 5.)
> 
> But in this case it seemed to be suggested
> that one shouldn't see the whole of /etc/group
> as "you don't need to know about that".
> I like to decide for myself what I need to know.

No one's stopping you.  Change the preferences.  That's why they're
called "Preferences".

Most people need not play with system accounts (and can do some serious
damage if they screw them up), which is why they're hidden by default.
If one needs to muck with them, it's assumed one knows what one's doing
and will change the preferences accordingly.

Fedora (and most other distributions) set up defaults that are
appropriate for _most_ of their users.  There is no way they can set
things up for _all_ users (the developers spend time writing code, not
honing their latent ESP capacities), so they permit you to tweak things
to your liking (unlike most of the crud from Redmond).

There are also some things that could be dangerous and they try to block
those.  One example: the root user's .bashrc aliasing "rm" to "rm -i" so
some twit with root privileges doesn't wipe out an entire directory tree
by accident.  I've seen it done with heinous consequences.

I find the alias a minor annoyance, but it's saved my arse once or twice
and with 30-odd years of managing systems, I'm hardly a tyro at Linux
(or Unix or VAX/VMS or M/VS or Pick or about 15 other operating
systems).

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- Rick Stevens, Principal Engineer             rstevens at internap.com -
- CDN Systems, Internap, Inc.                http://www.internap.com -
-                                                                    -
-  The problem with being poor is that it takes up all of your time  -
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