SUMMARY: Purpose of bin account and group etc

From: Mike Hudson <mjhudson_at_uwaterloo.ca>
Date: Fri, 23 Aug 2002 17:09:10 -0400

It seems that there is no documentation about the purpose of username
and group bin. There are no bin-owned suid programs.

alan_at_nabeth speculated that perhaps one could put a password and shell
on the bin account and let someone log and maintain those
programs without being root.

Mike Hudson

-----Original Message-----

Can anyone point me to online documentation describing the default
accounts found in /etc/passwd and their purpose?

For example, there is a user called bin. All programs in /usr/bin have
user=bin and group=bin ... does it matter whether they are owned by bin
or have user=root and group=system like everything else ...?


-- 
Mike Hudson
Dept. of Physics             Tel: +1-519-888-4567 x2212
Univ. of Waterloo            Fax: +1-519-746-8115
Waterloo, ON N2L 3G1         http://astro.uwaterloo.ca/~mjhudson
Received on Fri Aug 23 2002 - 21:13:48 NZST

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