Re: [TUHS] historical users and groups

Tim Bradshaw scripsit: Interesting etymology, but like most such things, false. Thus spake the Jargon File: wheel: n. [from slang "big wheel" for a powerful person] A person who has an active wheel bit. "We need to find a wheel to unwedge the hung tape drives." (See wedged, sense 1.) The traditional name of security group zero in BSD (to which the major system-internal users like root belong) is "wheel". Some vendors have expanded on this usage, modifying Unix so that only members of group "wheel" can go root. wheel bit: n. A privilege bit that allows the possessor to perform some restricted operation on a timesharing system, such as read or write any file on the system regardless of protections, change or look at any address in the running monitor, crash or reload the system, and kill or create jobs and user accounts. The term was invented on the TENEX operating system, and carried over to TOPS-20, XEROX-IFS, and others. The state of being in a privileged logon is sometimes called wheel mode. This term entered the Unix culture from TWENEX in the mid-1980s and has been gaining popularity there (esp. at university sites). See also root. wheel wars: n. [Stanford University] A period in larval stage during which student hackers hassle each other by attempting to log each other out of the system, delete each other's files, and otherwise wreak havoc, usually at the expense of the lesser users. -- My corporate data's a mess! John Cowan It's all semi-structured, no less. http://www.ccil.org/~cowan But I'll be carefree cowan(a)ccil.org Using XSLT On an XML DBMS.