On Fri, Mar 03, 2006 at 01:00:59PM -0500, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> Tom Lane wrote:
> > (I'm not finding it right now, but I'm pretty sure that the SUS
> > specifies that numeric userid == 0 for superuser, whereas "root" is not
> > required to be the name, so this would be more correct anyway.)
The Rationale (XRAT) Definitions section says for "Superuser":
This concept, with great historical significance to UNIX system users, has been replaced with the notion of
appropriateprivileges.
An excerpt from the definition of "Appropriate Privileges" is
For many historical implementations of the UNIX system, the presence of the term "appropriate privileges" in POSIX.1
maybe understood as a synonym for "superuser" (UID 0). However, other systems have emerged where this is not the case
andeach discrete controllable action has appropriate privileges associated with it. Because this mechanism is
implementation-defined,it must be described in the conformance document.
(I'd post links but people elsewhere haved bitched about doing that
because the documents are supposed to require registration to read.
If that's true then it seems silly that they're available to anybody
who knows the URL.)
> Can we assume 'id' is on all unix systems?
It's defined in Shell and Utilities (XCU). If the system doesn't
have it then one must wonder what else the system is missing.
--
Michael Fuhr
