[ih] What is the origin of the root account?

Noel Chiappa jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu
Fri Apr 12 16:09:30 PDT 2013


    > From: <esuarez at fcaglp.fcaglp.unlp.edu.ar>

    > I could imagine that "root" is the brainchild of Sun.

Ah, no.

>From my old hardcopy of "Setting Up Unix - Sixth Edition", on page 3, we find:

  "The only valid user names are 'root' and 'bin'. The root is the super-user"

My copy is not dated, but I imagine it's circa 1976 or so.

But my guess is the name goes back much further than than (in terms of Unix
versions) - probably to when the added accounts (not sure which version of
Unix that was at).

	Noel



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