Gavin McDonald wrote:
Ok, I'm a dummy for asking, I admit it. Heck I even top-post!
But "Why on Earth"(tm) would you want multiple user accounts
to have the same UID, let alone the same UID of 0?! UID is
_user_ID_, right? and UID 0 is Root, right?
UID in this case means the numerical user id, not the string associated
with that UID. It's counterintuitive that you would ever WANT to have
two strings map to the same UID, but it does come in handy if you want
to have more than one root password. For example:
I install a machine called "gremlin". I want to keep my root password
secret, and I want to have it be the password for the user "root" on
that machine. The principal user, however, sometimes takes the machine
out of the country, far beyond my reach. She wants to be able to access
the machine as super-user in case something goes wrong. I create
another account for her, say "jrandomgirl", and set the UID to be 0 in
/etc/passwd. She sets the password for jrandomgirl to be whatever she
likes. She can log in as jrandomgirl with the password of her choosing
as the super-user. I can log in as the user root with the password of
MY choosing.
There are many more elegant ways to deal with this situation (sudo comes
to mind), but this one is occasionally useful.
-Mindy Preston
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