(no subject)

[Dan Nelson]

In the last episode (Dec 19), gs_stoller at juno.com said:
> 	I discovered the user "operator" in  UNIX , found it in the
> book "Essential System Administration" by AEleen Frisch, and it has
> features that I would like to use.  The book says (on page 131) that
> this user exists on some BSD systems and it is used for back-ups and
> such.  It is like superuser ( root ) in that it can access any file
> regardless of the permission bits, but it operates readonly, it
> cannot modify unless the permission bits allow it to do so.

Actually, the "operator" user has read access to the raw device files
that filesystems are mounted on.  That's how it can do backups with the
dump command.  It has no special access to mounted filesystems
themselves.

-- 
	Dan Nelson
	dnelson at allantgroup.com